


The Library of Hades

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Cloak and Dagger [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Auror Partners, Aurors, Dark, Gen, M/M, Necromancy, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:30:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 79,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and Draco, fighting to be secure in their new relationship, face off against a twisted with an interest in human skin and blood, an old enemy interested in their case, and far too many people interested in their romantic lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One for the Books

**Author's Note:**

> The tenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series. Don't read this without having read the others.
> 
> Fair warning: This is the darkest fic so far, and is very gory.

“You fucked on your holiday, didn’t you?”  
  
Macgeorge spoke with a twist to her voice that Harry thought was supposed to make the words worse. But since he was more proud of what they had done than otherwise, he sent back a dazzling smile and bent over his report a second time. He still had to make his proper contribution to the Morningstar case, for which Draco had done all the paperwork while Harry was lying in bed trying to recover.  
  
“How clever of you to notice,” he muttered. His fingers did tremble, beneath the desk, but he didn’t think Macgeorge could see them. Draco had told him how much of a united front they had to present, so Harry would do that and hope for the best. “I shouldn’t think that more than, oh, twenty other people in the Ministry have been so clever.”  
  
There was silence. Harry didn’t look up, because that would give the stare he could feel too much power. He continued to sort through his memories instead, and finally found the right words to describe what it had been like to feel the barriers of time Occluding his memories on the Morningstar case break. He wrote them down with a flourish and signed the report, then set it aside for Draco to countersign when he arrived later that day.  
  
Silence, still. Harry finally sneaked a peek under his lashes and saw Macgeorge standing in front of her desk, staring down sightlessly at her paperweight, a glass globe with a mummified hand tucked inside it. She stroked the glass, then sighed, sat down, and began to work.  
  
Harry blinked. Then he shrugged and began to countersign some of the reports that Draco had written; Draco hadn’t waited even for that before he dragged Harry off on their holiday.  
  
 _And what a holiday._  
  
Harry suppressed the shiver of memory, desire, recollection, that coursed through his body, and settled himself with a secret smile. He had worried that he wouldn’t want to be apart from Draco when they returned to work, that he would have trouble concentrating, but now the thought of what might wait at home as a reward that evening gave him both joy and drive.  
  
 _This is the way it should be, all the time.  
  
This is the way that I never thought it could be, after Lionel._  
  
*  
  
Draco walked through the corridors of the Ministry with his head up and his face impersonal. It was the best solution to the covert glares and whispers that he felt following him. Some of them would come from rumors that he was dating Harry, and some of them would come from his past, and some of them would come from the fact that it was  _Harry_ he was dating.  
  
None of them had any validity unless Draco wanted them to have, he had decided. He had broken with his family and suffered seven years without their protection and their money. He had proven himself in the Auror program against the people who wanted him to fail, among them the Aurors who had taught him. It had left him scraped bare, down to the granite, but the nice thing about granite was how slowly it weathered. And if he had considerably fewer favors than he had possessed before this unorthodox holiday he and Harry had taken last week, well. That meant he could sever more ties.  
  
 _And weave new ones._  
  
“Auror Malfoy.”  
  
Okazes spoke like a branch breaking, sometimes, as dry and as powdery. Draco turned towards him and nodded. “Sir,” he said. It was the best way to talk to someone like Okazes, who hated Harry and would find a fault of respect in his partner if he could.  
  
Okazes just stared at Draco for a time, and then turned his back and snorted. “Come with me to my office,” he said. “We have much to discuss.”  
  
Draco followed him, and the stares increased to the point where the skin between his shoulder blades itched and the whispers rose to the level of audibility. He ignored them. Perhaps he could do nothing about the reactions of those more powerful than him, such as Okazes, but he still believed what he had told Harry in the Forest of Dean: their status as Aurors chasing the worst of Dark wizards meant they could get away with more.  
  
 _If only Okazes believes the same thing._  
  
Okazes’s office was always smaller than Draco thought it should be for someone of his status, second-in-command to the Head Auror, and with more worn furniture. This time, however, Okazes didn’t give him long to think about that. He sat down behind his desk, staring at Draco, and launched straight into his complaint. “I have heard rumors that you are dating Harry Potter.”  
  
 _Always “Harry,” never “Auror,_ ” Draco thought, and took a moment to pick his seat, although there were only two chairs before Okazes’s desk, both covered in the same tattered red cloth. “You can set your mind at rest, sir,” he said. “For once, the office gossips are not wrong. We are dating.”  
  
Okazes stared at him. Draco stared back, and amused himself with imagining how the other Socrates Aurors would react to the balance scale of the man’s eyes. Harry would squirm and flush, because that was how he handled  _anyone_ staring at him, even Draco. Macgeorge would sit there like a statue, and Rudie would quiver with irritation, and Warren and Jenkins would watch each other and take their cue from each other. That was one thing Draco envied the senior pair of Socrates Aurors, how perfectly they reacted as a team. He and Harry had had their struggles with that.  
  
“Auror partners are not allowed to date each other,” Okazes said.  
  
Draco smiled at him. “You forget what I know,” he said softly. “That there are few recruits you can place into the Socrates Corps. That since I and Harry became partners, there have been fewer deaths, and the majority among the twisted, where they are  _supposed_ to be, instead of their innocent victims.”  
  
Okazes half-shut his eyes. “I know those things as well, Auror Malfoy,” he said.  
  
 _I was right. If he keeps calling me by my title even when I provoke him, I think he does respect me more than he does Harry._  Draco sat up and arranged his face in a prim little smile. “Auror Okazes,” he said. “You know them, but you don’t appear to take account of them. What would happen if you ended our partnership, as you are supposed to due to regulations?”  
  
“I had hoped that you had more respect for regulations than this,” Okazes said.  
  
 _And less respect for Potter._ He didn’t need to say it. Draco could read the words working beneath the muscles of his face, as though written under the skin in glowing letters.  
  
“Now you know better,” Draco said, and held gazes, and smiled. “I always feel that my days are improved when I can learn something new about those I share this world with.”  
  
Okazes said nothing for a few moments. Then he nodded, and reached for a folder that lay to the side on a teetering pile as though he had planned to do it all along. Draco accepted it and opened it.  
  
There was a photograph on top. Draco stared, squinting, and winced in irritation when the photographer’s hand intruded into the picture. The hand was shaking, he noted, but he didn’t know why. It seemed to be a photograph of an older book, with pages of parchment so worn that they barely appeared distinct in the picture, and red lettering that made it even harder to read.  
  
Draco paused, then, and looked harder, and reminded himself which Corps he worked in.  
  
“This is a book of human skin, with the writing in blood?” he asked calmly. “That seems excessive, but if our twisted has a liking for making such things, it ought to be easy to catch them. I would look first for someone who had worked in a shop such as Borgin and Burkes and had experience with using spells on Dark books. Or perhaps a more ordinary setting, such as a bookshop or library.”  
  
“Not a book,” Okazes said. “Look at the second picture.”  
  
Draco turned the page. This was a wider shot, and it took him some minutes to make sense of it. When he did, he curled his lip, his stomach churning.  
  
“Will you take the case?” Okazes asked. “You look as if you are about to faint as you sit there. Not that I can blame you, as it  _is_ grotesque.”  
  
Draco looked up at him. Okazes was leaning forwards, and once again the letters were visible beneath his skin, though Draco was no longer as pleased with that metaphor as he had been when he first thought of it.  
  
 _And invaluable Aurors, as you have just been bragging you are, do not faint where they sit._  
  
Draco sat up further and inclined his head. “I think Harry will find this rather interesting,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of us.” He stepped out of the office before Okazes could give him an official dismissal, but that was not  _quite_ enough of a violation of the rules of decorum for Okazes to chide him for it.  
  
Once back in the corridor, he opened the file and stared again.  
  
Not a book. Draco was looking at the wall of a room, perhaps once an ordinary parlor, and what he had mistaken for a book bound in human skin and written in human blood was an entire skin, spread over the wall and bound there with large blobs of guts and viscera. Someone turned inside out, and the blood used for the letters.  
  
Draco knew of no spell that could do such a thing, not even the Darkest magic. That still had to yield to physical reality and the control of the wizard over his wand, and the guts and viscera would have slid down the wall and the lettering would be less than precise if cast by a wizard who had used all these spells in quick succession.  _Perhaps_  there was someone out there with the mastery to discover these incantations, the patience to wait in between them so that he could recover his strength, and the ability to also cast charms that would unclot the blood and keep the guts fresh enough to work with without losing that newly regained strength or the anger that had driven him to do this in the first place. But it was unlikely.  
  
This was the work of a twisted, Draco thought. Someone’s flaw, Dark wandless magic that reached out and simply did what it did without any reasons except those that existed somewhere deep within the twisted’s mind.   
  
Those flaws had done remarkable things before, things Draco had  _seen_ done. Created flawless, glimmering glass globes that stirred incredibly realistic dreams in some who touched them and were harmless to others. Brought a drawing on a wall to life so that it started to devour Harry’s legs. Traveled in time and made others forget every detail associated with them.  
  
But as he stared, stomach quivering, at the display of the body on the wall, Draco thought this might be a new limit to “remarkable.”  
  
*  
  
Draco came in late that morning, and the moment he stepped through the door of the large Socrates office, Harry stood up. Draco’s shoulders hunched, his eyes were on the file in his hands but not glued there, and his strides were less long and effortless than they should be. Something had happened.  
  
Macgeorge looked up to stare at them, and then sniffed and turned away. Draco extended the file to Harry silently.  
  
“Twisted,” he said. “A bad one.”  
  
“Are they?” Harry said, and then opened the folder and saw the top two pictures. It had been a long time since something he saw in Auror work made him want to vomit.   
  
He stared in silence, and then put aside the top photographs and turned to the contents of the file itself.  
  
The victim was Adriana Lugar, a witch who ran a correspondence course for Squibs. Harry resolved to remember that, although he doubted it would help. Unless the twisted was avenging a Squib family member or friend they thought had been taken in by the course, they couldn’t have a connection; Squibs simply didn’t develop this kind of magic late in life.  
  
 _You thought, once, that twisted only happened when someone studied the Dark Arts enough to go mad. But you’ve seen that it can happen because of pain and swallowing someone else’s blood._  
  
Harry grimaced. That was the problem with challenging the Ministry’s accepted definitions and setting up a different one: you had to give up the comforting certainties that came along with those definitions.  
  
The file contained a lot of speculation and not much in the way of facts. Some of the investigating Aurors thought it was Adriana’s business partner, who had left in in a huff a few months ago; some thought, from questioning of witnesses who had noticed nothing until one of them saw a stream of blood under the door, that Adriana might have been the target of a random twisted. Twisted did go after random victims, Harry knew. And investigating Aurors. And people who had hurt them.  
  
As yet, no leads.  
  
“We will want to find and interview the business partner,” he said over his shoulder to Draco, who had come up behind him.  
  
“Of course,” Draco said. “Did you find the transcription yet?”  
  
“The transcription of the writing on her—skin?” Harry asked, because it was easier to refer to Adriana’s body that way than by the whole of what had happened to her. He felt Draco’s chin brush his shoulder as Draco nodded. “Not yet.” He paged through the file until he found it.  
  
The transcription was biographical facts, but it had no punctuation and no separation between one sentence and another. Exactly the way it had appeared on Adriana’s skin, Harry thought, but he half-wished the recording Auror had troubled to add in the mechanics of ordinary writing; he had to struggle to make sense of it.  
  
 _adriana lugar born in 1947 ran a correspondence course for squibs always wanted to find a partner never did once dated allison davies once thought things would last they didn’t once wanted to become an auror never made it into the training program said she would lend money to her sister to have a baby did not her sister never had the baby adriana was never an aunt dead sister dead brother last of her family no lugar cousins in the last generation…_  
  
And on and on it flowed, a stream of sense both trivial and important. Harry did wonder how the murderer had known some of it. Information on her family ought to have been easy enough to find, but private desires that Adriana had probably never confessed to anyone, or a conversation between Adriana and her sister that would have been in private? Harry wondered how.  
  
“We should look among her close friends first, then,” he said, when he could make himself look at the skin again. It didn’t resemble anything human at all. Adriana’s body looked like a flayed animal, tacked on the wall, with the head and the arms a strange shape with nothing inside of them—  
  
Harry made himself stop. He really  _would_ vomit if he kept on, and Macgeorge was watching.  
  
“I’m not sure,” Draco said, and tapped the transcript, which he had tugged out of the pile of papers again. Harry glanced at it, and then away. “I wonder if this isn’t part of the flaw, to turn the body inside out and write the truth of the dead person’s life on their skin at the same time.”  
  
Harry snorted. “How do we know it was the truth? We won’t, until we talk to more people than the Aurors who began the investigation did.”  
  
Draco sighed and rolled his eyes. “ _Listen_ to me, Harry. That’s not what I meant. Look at this.” He pointed to the blobs of purple and black that secured the skin to the wall, and which Harry hadn’t wanted to look at it closely. “This is her  _organs._ Liver and lungs, at least, that I’ve been able to identify, and part of the heart. What normal magic can do this? I think the whole thing is part of the flaw. Turning the body inside out, pinning it to the wall that way, the writing in the blood—and what’s written.”  
  
Harry stared at it, and finally had to nod. It would be absurdly rare for someone to master all the spells that were needed to do that without alerting someone, he thought, and although that person  _might_ exist, they would conserve theories by going with the idea that their twisted had done all of it for now.  
  
Unless this was going to be a group of Dark wizards rather than a single twisted. Harry had to admit he would almost prefer that theory.  
  
“I don’t know if we can say for certain until we interview someone who knew Adriana,” he said. He caught Draco’s eye and added hastily, “But your theory does make sense.”  
  
Draco nodded. Harry could see the marks around his eyes, the way he breathed, that meant he had had much the same initial reaction to the slaughter as Harry had, but he was calming down and stepping back onto the path of intellectual coolness now, treating the case as a case, and Lugar as a victim like any other.  
  
Harry tried to think of her that way, as  _Lugar._ But the name  _Adriana_ kept coming back to him, and he suspected that was how he would continue to think of her.   
  
No one deserved this, he thought. No matter what they had done. No one deserved to be turned inside out and have the truth of their life written for anyone to see on their skin, in their own blood.  
  
His mouth dripped with the sickness of it, his hands clenched, his nails ached.  
  
 _I won’t let this go unavenged, Adriana. I promise you._  
  
*  
  
“There was something we left out of the reports.”  
  
Draco settled back against the wall, and didn’t show his immediate reaction to that confession. Auror Edward Tympany had a lot more seniority than Draco did, and this was an unusual case, one that had been handed on to the Socrates Corps for a reason. Ordinary Aurors didn’t deal with twisted and the kind of damage they could cause.  
  
But Draco, inwardly, raged. If he hadn’t thought to suggest that he and Harry go and question the investigating Aurors listed in the reports, they might never have known this.  
  
“And what was that?”   
  
Harry’s voice was much more soothing than Draco’s in a situation like this, softer and with a rumbling tone in the back of it that seemed to reassure the people he spoke to that a lion would stand between them and danger. Draco smiled briefly. He wondered what Tympany and his partner would say if they knew that the lion, in this case, was growling  _at_ them.  
  
Harry’s eyes had had that familiar, dangerous fire since he looked at the pictures, and Draco knew he would have to be alert in multiple directions, now. Harry had promised on their holiday that he would no longer foolishly risk his life, and Draco trusted his word, as far as it went. But it was a new promise, and Harry was new at keeping it. And he wanted someone to pay for what had happened to Adriana. He might not try to die in the name of protecting Draco, but he might go too far in the name of getting revenge.  
  
Ultimately, the dead were the dead, and couldn’t appreciate such a gesture. So Draco wouldn’t let it happen.  
  
“Everything was  _fresh_ ,” Tympany said, drawing his fingers over his face and closing his eyes as though that would keep the sight from returning to his brain. Draco rolled his eyes, sure that Tympany wouldn’t notice. His partner was hovering over him, anyway, and had no attention to spare for someone doubting Tympany’s story. “The body hadn’t rotted. The blood didn’t smell. It had to have been a few days since she died, since that was the last time anyone saw her, but—you wouldn’t know it. And I didn’t sense any magic that would keep it that way.”  
  
Harry glanced back at Draco as though checking what he thought of this information, but they both knew that something deeper and shared went on between them. Draco had told Harry he thought everything must be fresh because of the colors in the photographs, and because the blood used in the letters had been bright red, not dried to brown. This was further confirmation.  
  
And while Draco privately wouldn’t trust Tympany to sense that someone was being held under the Cruciatus Curse in the next room, he thought it likely that he was right—this time. Keeping everything fresh was part of their twisted’s Dark gift rather than something achieved through spells. Like everything else.  
  
This flaw was deeper and more complicated, at least on the surface, than that of anyone else they had tracked so far, Draco thought. Perhaps what Alto had been able to do, altering someone’s mind, and what Morningstar had done, traveling in time, were more complicated magically, but they were easier to  _understand;_ Draco and Harry could see how the parts fit together. Here, they didn’t, yet.  
  
Unless the whole purpose was to create a brutal “artwork” of the kind that he had done with Adriana Lugar’s body. Or unless the writing was the most important part, the revelation of truth.  
  
Draco thought it might be, but he could not say, yet. He only wished they had some lead, some suspect.  
  
“Thank you,” Harry said, and stood up and followed Draco out of the room. His jaw was set, and the burning in his eyes had gone deeper still.  
  
Draco reached out and clenched his hand down on Harry’s arm, feeling the muscles shift and tense. “I want you to promise me that you won’t go charging into the midst of anything,” he said calmly.  
  
Harry hesitated, then said, “Yes. I was going to suggest splitting up to interview Adriana’s neighbors, but I think we should stay together.”  
  
“I’m always in favor of our being together,” Draco murmured lazily back.  
  
That won a lovely flush from Harry, and a laugh, at last, and they set out side by side, Harry’s strides matching his.  
  
 _It is terrible,_ Draco tried to say, through the way his hand lingered on Harry’s arm and the way his eyes stayed on his face.  _But we will face it, and bring whoever did this down.  
  
_ His thoughts skittered in another, wry direction as they slid over the recent past and the other arguments they’d had, besides the ones about Harry risking his life.  _At least I don’t need to worry that this is a twisted Harry will feel compassion for and insist deserves to live._


	2. Skin and Blood

“When was the last time you saw Miss Lugar?”  
  
Harry lost count of how many times they asked that question, up and down the stairs, all through the flats that surrounded Adriana’s, and in the streets around it, where Draco suggested they go when they were done speaking to the immediate neighbors.  
  
The answers were the same, and although some people shrank the way that someone guilty always did when they were faced with Aurors, Harry didn’t think they were lying about the crime he and Draco were here to actually investigate. Something else, something for which they couldn’t salve their consciences, but their stories sounded real.  
  
They had last seen Adriana when she walked home from the shops at about seven in the evening three days before. She had paused to talk about the weather—a mild, lovely day—with several of them, and had hinted to one woman that she thought her returns from her Squib correspondence course were going to be heavy this half-year. Then she had laughed and clapped her hands, and gone home smiling.  
  
“Did she say anything about whether she expected a special surprise?” Draco was the one who asked, because Harry had opened his mouth, and then their witness, Katie Farren, began to shiver and he couldn’t make himself continue. Instead, he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder and cast a Warming Charm around her. “Did she talk as though she thought someone would visit her?”  
  
Farren sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I really didn’t know her that well,” she murmured. “Sometimes she would complain about things. The weather, the prices, you know. But not about her personal life.”  
  
Harry nodded. It was the same thing that so many people had said about Adriana. She kept herself to herself, and you were lucky if she referred to something personal in the most veiled terms.  
  
It made him wonder if what the twisted had written in blood on her skin was true after all. If she had experienced a failed love affair…there were some people who would let that twist them into retreating from all human contact.  
  
 _I nearly experienced that, with Lionel._  
  
It just made Harry all the more determined to find the twisted who had killed her. Draco had brought Harry out of the shell he’d tried to shut himself up in after Lionel’s death. Perhaps someone could have brought Adriana out, too, but they would never get the chance to find out.   
  
Harry swallowed around the burning in his throat, and noticed that Draco was looking at him. He smiled at him as reassuringly as he could and found his voice for Farren again. “Did the Aurors who came to investigate the death talk to you, too?” They had already spoken with the neighbor, Malcolm Pounce, who had found the blood creeping out from under Adriana’s door. He hadn’t touched the door or called to her; he had simply fled and firecalled the Aurors. The sensible thing, the thing the Ministry was always trying to urge them to do, but in this case, Harry would have appreciated the testimony of someone intrepid enough to intrude into her flat.  
  
Farren nodded. “And it doesn’t make any  _sense_ ,” she suddenly burst out. “Adriana was just  _there._ Why would anyone want to kill her? She was normal. She didn’t hate anyone. She didn’t hurt anyone. But she didn’t save people, either. Why would someone care enough to kill her like that?” Farren shivered again, and Harry renewed his Warming Charm and glanced at Draco, wondering if he had any other questions he wanted to ask.  
  
To Harry’s surprise, Draco’s eyes were narrowed. A moment later, however, he met Harry’s gaze and gave a tiny shake of his head. Whatever thought he had had fled, or wasn’t ripe to be shared yet.  
  
“Sometimes the actions of Dark wizards like this are inexplicable,” Draco said gently. “But I promise, we will find and ask him, and we can ensure that you receive the answers. If you’d like to.”  
  
Farren blinked, looked up, and then surprised Harry by nodding fiercely. “Yes. I want to know. Even if it doesn’t make sense. I want to  _know_.”  
  
Draco looked at her again, his head slowly tilting to the side as though her statements would make a different kind of sense from that angle, and then took one of the cards that he carried all the time and tried to harass Harry into carrying, too, from his pocket and held it out. “Contact me if you think of something else,” he said. “That has my Floo address. Anything, no matter how small.”  
  
Farren nodded at him and tucked it away. “Thank you,” she said, her voice a parchment rustle. “That makes me feel better.”  
  
Draco smiled briefly at her and said nothing, but Harry knew that was the reason Draco had done it. He couldn’t keep from meeting Draco’s eyes in approval as they turned away from Farren and resumed their stroll down the street outside of Adriana’s flat.  
  
Draco gave him his blandest smile, absorbing, Harry was sure, but not responding to the praise in his face. “We have to see the flat now,” he said. “Are you ready?”  
  
Harry started to answer, then saw some of the same gentleness in the way Draco was looking at him as he had handed Farren with, and bridled. “Yes,  _ready_ ,” he snapped. “I’ve seen horrible things before, Draco. You don’t need to coddle me.” He wondered if he would ever have another lover who would cause him to swing between happiness and rage so fast.  
  
 _If I ever have any other lover._  
  
At the moment, Harry had to admit, it was hard to imagine that he would want one.   
  
“This is going to be worse than those horrible things, I think,” Draco said, and turned back towards the building. Harry took a deep breath, one that he told himself had to be fresher than the air in the flat no matter what they found there, and followed.  
  
*  
  
Draco stood very still in the door of the flat, turning his head. Of course those first Aurors had removed Adriana’s body from the wall, so that her former business partner could give it a decent burial. She had been in a state of shock, but she had also been the only one who seemed to care about Adriana at all, as a person instead of someone motionlessly moving through other people’s lives.  
  
Draco felt the wriggle of the thought he had encountered earlier, when Farren had said that Adriana was perfectly normal. But it wouldn’t come to his grasp yet, so he dipped it back into the dark waters of his mind and concentrated on the mess in front of him.  
  
Only two things had been disturbed, the investigating Aurors had said, when they came here. One had been the dining room table, which was roughly shoved out into the center of the room. The notches its feet had cut in the carpet implied it had stood along the wall where the twisted had pinned Adriana’s skin. Draco shook his head, wondering why the killer had cast it away. What was it to him if blood or guts coagulated on it?  
  
But regardless, it seemed that Adriana had opened the door to her killer. He hadn’t had to force his way in.  
  
The rest was the blood.  
  
The Aurors had done what they could to make the flat easy to walk in, but they simply  _couldn’t_ clean all the blood. It still layered the walls, the floor, the furniture that had apparently stood behind the twisted when he was slicing into Adriana’s body with his flaw. Draco looked at the fans and fans of it, red and shining still, easing to the ground endlessly along the same trails on the sides of the cabinets and bookshelves. It was all fresh, as the body and the things holding the body to the wall had been.  
  
“Draco, look.”  
  
Harry’s voice had a growl in the back of it. His hand closed on Draco’s arm, and Draco followed his gaze.  
  
As he watched, a small waterfall of crimson inched down to the bottom of the largest bookcase, which as far as Draco could tell held mostly historical and Potions texts. A large bead of blood touched the floor—  
  
And then vanished. Draco snapped his gaze back to the top of the trail, the top of the bookcase, and saw the bead, or at least another bead the same size and which looked exactly the same, begin to inch down.  
  
“That’s part of the reason so much of it is fresh,” Harry said softly. “It’s renewing itself when it touches the floor.” He hesitated. “Do you think this twisted could be like Nancy, Draco? Someone who can stop the time in a certain place, but makes it so that the action just repeats, instead of being forgotten?”  
  
“It’s worth considering,” Draco murmured, walking into the room and trying to ignore the way the carpet squished beneath him. The first investigating team’s greatest clean-up effort had been on the carpet, but some blood had sunk deep. Draco didn’t look at his own footprints; he would clean his boots when they were out of here, and until then, he didn’t want to know. “And I wish that you would call her Morningstar, Harry. That was the last name she wanted to take. It’s the one we might as well give her.”  
  
“Nancy,” Harry flung at his back, and then spun and stalked softly away from Draco, into the bedroom of the flat. Draco didn’t think he would find anything there, since the blood splatters stopped at least a meter short of the door, but perhaps it was for the best that they spend some time apart right now.  
  
Draco faced the wall where the body had clung, and studied the blood, and half-lidded his eyes.   
  
The memories he reached back to were ones he hated disturbing, but on the other hand, they had taught him several useful things about dealing with his more grotesque cases. The Dark Lord had slaughtered so many people in front of Draco that he could see thestrals several dozen times over. For the moment, that meant he thought he could visualize the way that the killer and Adriana were standing when he began to flay her.  
  
If he cut her throat…  
  
Draco nodded. He hadn’t used a knife, but his own magic, which had probably stabbed fiercely into Adriana’s body and continued cutting down. It had worked in one long, continuous stroke if Draco could believe those pictures, slicing around the edges, preserving the shape of every finger, following the curves of the elbows and the legs…  
  
His gorge rose. He closed his eyes and took a mental step back, the way his father had always tried to make him do no matter the thing he was thinking about, to consider this from a different perspective.  
  
The killer had cut Adriana. The blood had sprayed. Some of the patterns made sense if the body was swinging back and forth, if she was struggling as he cut, and the blood would go on spurting out. He wasn’t just cutting into one powerful artery; it was the whole damn thing, and his power would preserve the blood, because that was what he wanted to write with.  
  
Draco tried to imagine what went on in the mind of a twisted who developed this Dark power, and had to give up in the end. Most of them made sense when you understood the whole case, but not before then. The twisted were mad.  
  
And that was the thing Harry didn’t understand, when he started talking about how he and Draco had Dark wandless gifts, like the twisted, and were only a few steps away from twisted themselves, and so they should spare the ones they hunted if at all possible. _They_ were sane.  
  
Draco had had the experience of being a twisted for a short while, under Healer Alto’s flaw, and  _that_ was not sanity.  
  
It was broken, fractured, tugging. It was the sureness of movements threaded through with the dreamy sensation of falling. It was the exercise of magic without a wand, yes, but it was also the exercise of magic without restraint, without will.  
  
Draco wanted to be in control of himself. What Healer Alto had done to him, even though he had come back from it, had been bad enough to require the intervention of a Mind-Healer. He did not want to experience it again.  
  
But he could remember how it felt well enough to imagine a few things, as well, about their killer.  
  
“Draco? Can you come in here?” Harry’s voice sounded from the bedroom, so distant for a moment that it sounded as if it was coming through a pipe. Draco blinked and shook his head, waking from the dream of his memories.   
  
“Are you all right?” Draco asked, turning towards the bedroom himself. “I thought the twisted only worked on her out here.” With an effort, he recalled the reports in the file. No, none of them had said anything about blood in the bedroom.  
  
“This is something else.”   
  
And yes, there was a strangeness in Harry’s voice that didn’t come from the mental state Draco had worked himself into. He quickened his steps, and didn’t run only because of the bookshelves that crowded in every direction.  
  
Harry needed him. He would always come.  
  
*  
  
Harry crouched in front of the small table beside Adriana’s bed and stared. He hadn’t managed to make himself back away even when he realized that Draco had gone silent in the main room of the flat. It was too weird, and if he continued staring, then he thought it might begin to make sense, like one of those Muggle pictures where horses and zebras hid among clouds.  
  
But this only registered as weirder. So Harry at last called for Draco to come to him, and rose to his feet, shaking his head, as he came through the bedroom door.  
  
“Did the file say anything about this?” he asked, gesturing towards the table. He was pretty sure it hadn’t, but he didn’t always read the whole file carefully, especially in cases like this where he got distracted by the pictures and his own desire to bring down the criminal.  
  
“What?” Draco asked, and then got around Harry and saw the table. His voice was chopped off. Harry still didn’t look away from the sight, but knew if he had glanced at Draco he would have seen narrowed eyes and pursed lips.  
  
“Well,” Draco said at last, in an effort at lightness that scraped and bit. “So we know that this twisted has a symbol.”  
  
Harry nodded.  
  
Spread over the top and legs of the table was a dark patch that looked like a drawing in soot, or, as one came nearer, in shadow. Harry had forced himself to touch it, and found that its texture was no different from the texture of the wood it covered. It certainly didn’t have the tacky stickiness of blood or the thick texture of the viscera he and Draco had seen binding the flayed body in the photographs.  
  
Seen from too close, the picture had no form, as Harry had realized when he spent those moments crouching beside it and squinting. Seen from a distance back, it did. It looked like an unfurled scroll, though the shape was necessarily a bit distorted by the edge of the tabletop and the knobby nature of its legs. On the scroll was written a name, wrapped in the soot-shadow around the roundness of the legs, and reaching up along the underside to the tabletop.   
  
 _MICHAEL._  
  
“Good work, Harry.” Draco’s voice was quiet as he touched Harry’s shoulder. “It might not be the name of our twisted, but it’s a clue.”  
  
Harry nodded. “It could be the name of the next victim,” he said, voice hollow as he tried not to think how many people in the wizarding world were named Michael. “Or the name of the person he’s taking vengeance for, if he is.”  
  
“Perhaps, yes,” Draco said, and then leaned nearer and pulled out a camera from his pocket. Harry blinked at him, feeling oddly cheated.  
  
“I didn’t know you had that,” he muttered.  
  
“Now you do,” Draco said, which was like him, and began to photograph the symbol. Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to the drawing room. He had discovered some things, sure, but he wanted to see if there was anything else he could do for Adriana, anything that might ease her passing—though that was impossible now—or help them locate her murderer.  
  
He walked along the bookshelves, looking at them. Books of all sorts, he thought. Potions theory, which everyone who wanted to look intelligent seemed to buy, and novels, and books of fairy tales that she might have had from the time she was a child, and a book that was thin and covered in shady green leather. Harry reached for it.  
  
The book turned and lunged at him.  
  
Harry ducked with a shout, automatically swinging his wand above his head to create a bubble shield. The book slammed into the shield and slid down the side. Harry stared at it, and now he could see the teeth between the pages, how they hinged together in a way that would keep the book shut and without suspicion, and the snapping void between the teeth that led down to something that pulsed and shifted.  
  
Draco had come running from the bedroom the moment he cried out, and now another book leaped off the shelf and towards him. Harry cast from under the bubble shield, a Stunner. That book fell limp to the floor, but two more joined it, sides spread out to glide like flying squirrels.  
  
The book in front of Harry tried to bite through the shield. Harry, staring, thought he saw the magic actually give a little under those pointed fangs, and shuddered. That meant he would have to be careful. Perhaps the thing could disrupt spells by acting like that. He didn’t know.  
  
“I think we found his companions!” he shouted breathlessly to Draco, as he dispelled the shield and rose to battle the book.  
  
Draco grunted. Harry caught a glimpse of leather and paper flapping around his partner’s head and had to turn away, because otherwise he would become more caught up in saving Draco than defending himself, and Draco _hated_ that.  
  
The book tried to fasten itself to his leg. Harry aimed his wand directly down the void between the teeth and said, “ _Incendio._ ”  
  
The fire wrapped itself gleefully around the paper and the teeth, which seemed to be made of sharpened parchment. The book shrieked once, a reedy voice like a bird’s, and then the flames consumed it.  
  
Draco was whispering a different spell, one that snared the books inside a dark net. Harry reckoned he could do that. Perhaps he wanted some of them alive—for what values of that word might apply here.  
  
But Harry turned and raised his wand to the rest of the books, and at the first sight of the fire that sparked along the holly wood, the rest of the books flew off the shelves and towards him. There was a storm of green, purple, brown: leather, wood, stiffened dragonhide. Harry heard voices muttering and whispering and rustling, and thought the books were reciting their stories as they flew.  
  
The flames caught and devoured them, though. Whatever the twisted had done to them to bring them to life, he couldn’t make them hardier than ordinary books. Harry watched melting ink and flaming paper and felt better when he glanced back at Draco, who had six of them trapped in his net like the world’s oddest butterflies.  
  
Draco caught his eye, but nodded past him at the bookshelves. Harry turned around, wondering if he had missed some of the vicious creatures.  
  
No. Instead, inside the bookshelves and flowing over them in the same way it had flowed over the top and legs of the table in the bedroom, was the sooty symbol of the unfolded scroll. There was another word written in it, easier to interpret this time, since there were fewer irregularities in the shelves to distort it.  
  
And that word, in combination with the one written on the table, made Harry’s heart seem to slow.  
  
 _CORNER._  
  
*  
  
“I remember a Michael Corner from school, yes,” Draco said, and felt his mouth draw tight in the way that it did when he was discussing something distasteful. He didn’t know anything of this Michael Corner to make Draco regard him that way, no, but Harry was panting over him, even though they had been back in the Socrates office for an hour. “That doesn’t mean that I know anything to his advantage or disadvantage.”  
  
Harry, meanwhile, had spent most of that hour spilling ink on the parchment as he wrote down everything he remembered of Corner, and now he paced feverishly back and forth in the middle of the office, muttering. “It doesn’t matter how hard it is,” he announced suddenly, spinning around.  
  
“Oh?” Draco kept his face neutral, but tightened his fingers on his wand. He knew exactly what consequences tended to follow when Harry made announcements like that.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “He used to date Ginny, and I know they dated again when I was in Auror training. She’ll probably know where he is. I have to go talk to her.”  
  
Draco smiled. “Of course. An excellent idea. And I will come with you.”  
  
Harry jumped and glared at him like a scalded cat. “No. Are you mental? She won’t talk in front of you.”  
  
“And you’re not going to her house by yourself,” Draco said, cocking his head and giving Harry a winsome smile. “So I think it would be a good idea for both of us to get over our silly prejudices, and go.”  
  
Harry leaned in. Draco smiled at him, and couldn’t help making it more genuine this time. Harry was so intoxicating like this, entrancing, with his eyes and his mouth close to Draco’s.  
  
“She won’t talk in front of you,” Harry repeated, as though he thought Draco didn’t understand English. “That means I go, and you stay here.”  
  
“I know that you used to date her,” Draco said.  _Fuck subtlety. “_ I’m going with you.”  
  
Harry blinked, then laughed. “She knows that I’m gay,” he said. “Why do you think that she’d try to seduce me?”  
  
Draco shrugged. “I don’t know. As an insult to me, perhaps. I’m going.”  
  
“None of the Weasleys have ever cared  _that_ much about you, Draco.”  
  
Harry intended his voice to scathe. Draco only smiled. “Good. Then my mere presence shouldn’t shut up her mouth.”  
  
Harry glared at him some more, but Draco had far more experience at the waiting game than Harry did. In the end, Harry threw up his hands, and they went together.


	3. An Old Friend

“Ginny?” Harry took the lead when they came to the door of Weasley’s house, of course, knocking and calling out as though he wished she wouldn’t hear him. Draco leaned against the wall of the house and looked around with his hands in his pockets.  
  
He had to admit that Weasley had done well for herself. This house, in Hogsmeade, near the center and the shops, was large, built of brick, with stone railings on the small veranda in front and stone walls around the garden. When Draco glanced over the wall, he saw climbing vines and sunflowers, and a few deep-colored blossoms that made him raise his eyebrows. He wondered if Harry understood what it meant for someone who wasn’t a Potions master to have those flowers in her garden.  
  
The door opened before Harry could knock again, and Weasley’s voice said, “Did you want to—oh, Harry. It’s you.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes and bowed his head. He had to admit that he wasn’t always the best judge of tone in the voice of someone he didn’t know well—spending so much time around his parents as a child had ruined him for the nuances in the voices of others—but Weasley didn’t sound exactly thrilled to see Harry.  
  
 _All to the better._ Draco judged it was the right time to swirl away from his post against the wall and stand beside Harry, so that Weasley could see him. She looked at him once, with a flicker of her eyelids that could have meant a number of things, and then turned to look at Harry again.  
  
“I’m sorry, Ginny,” Harry said, with a sober restraint that Draco wished he would use more often when they were interviewing witnesses. “But we’ve uncovered evidence that Michael Corner may be involved in one of our cases. Can we come in?”  
  
Weasley paused, frowning. She had grown far taller than Draco remembered, taller than he might have anticipated, with deep auburn hair that glowed as if it had coals in it. She had direct eyes, too, and calluses on her hands that looked as if they came from complicated wandwork, or intense Quidditch. She ignored Draco better than his parents could, and finally said, “I’m not dating him right now.”  
  
“But you have more recent information on him than we do,” Harry said, and waited. Draco bit his tongue, only placing a hand low on Harry’s back where Weasley could notice it if she wanted.  
  
Weasley rubbed her forehead. Then she sighed and began, “It’s not a great time.”  
  
“A woman is dead,” Draco said, voice low and even, level, pleasant. “A woman who did no harm to anyone, a woman who was flayed alive and had her skin spread on the wall like a book, and the truth of her life, or what her killer thought was the truth, written on it in blood. We have no leads. No one saw the killer. She let him in, by all the signs. The carpet is still deep enough in blood to squash when one walks across it.”  
  
Weasley clicked her neck around to look at him. Draco leaned forwards over Harry’s shoulder. “You can still deny us entrance, if you want to,” he said. “I only wanted you to understand what we’re working on, so that you can answer our questions better.”  
  
“ _Draco_ ,” Harry said in a low hiss, but Draco didn’t care.   
  
Weasley flung up her hands and stepped aside. “Why not?” she snapped. “You might as well come in and argue with me in my house as out on my doorstep where anyone can see.”  
  
Draco smiled as he stepped in. “Worried about what your neighbors will make of an Auror visit, Weasley?”  
  
Harry interrupted with noisy protests that Draco didn’t have to pay attention to, because he knew their content beforehand. His attention was on Weasley, and the violent way she turned her back on them, walking towards the kitchen where a kettle was singing.  
  
 _Interesting._  
  
He sat down with one leg crossed over the other, and spent a moment adjusting the perfect angle of his knees. Then Harry hissed at him sharply enough to attract his attention, and Draco smiled at him. “What?”  
  
*  
  
Harry wanted to rip the hair from his head. Or Draco’s head from his shoulders. Either would have been acceptable, really, and Harry thought he was as close to one as the other.  
  
“You  _said_ you wouldn’t antagonize her,” he hissed. He glanced over his shoulder, but Ginny was still in the kitchen, and the longer Harry went without having to see her still, questioning face, the happier he was. Her welcome had been far from what he expected, even given that he was a former boyfriend asking about another of her former boyfriends. “And you did that immediately, even though you must be able to see that she doesn’t want to date me.”  
  
“Indeed not,” Draco said, with the smiling affability that made Harry want to kick him sometimes. “And did you wonder why she seemed so unhappy to see us?”  
  
“You think you know already, so why don’t you tell me?” Harry turned away and prowled restlessly around the huge drawing room of Ginny’s house, which had been the reason, she had told him, that she’d bought the place. It occupied the entire ground floor except for the kitchen and a bathroom, and it had so many windows that Ginny had to keep a giant fire roaring in the hearth. She had more bookshelves now than she had had when he last visited. Harry gave them a suspicious look and sheared away to look out the window in spite of himself. Ginny had large flowers in her garden, too, he noticed, red-purple blossoms that drooped and overgrew their stems, but kept well back from the wall. Ginny pruned them with sharp-edged spells.  
  
“She didn’t want an Auror visit right now,” Draco said, maddeningly. Harry stiffened his back but kept it turned. “Why is that? It’s not that she didn’t want to see you; this is more simple and more complicated than that. She might hate me, she might despise you, but she looked panicked when you opened the door.”  
  
“No,” Harry said.  
  
“Yes, she did.”  
  
“You were standing back to the side, you couldn’t see anything anyway,” Harry snapped at him.  
  
Draco leaned gracefully back at the same moment as the kitchen door opened again and Ginny came in with a delicate green enamel tray and three cups of tea. “You have to consider the possibility.”  
  
“What possibility?” Ginny glanced back and forth between the two of them as she set the tray down on the only table in the room, a low thing in between the couches that faced the fire. Harry came reluctantly over and sat down. Ginny didn’t have a huge table because, she said, she had no interest in encouraging her guests to stay for long.  
  
“The possibility that you might know something about Corner,” Draco said, and picked up the nearest teacup, and beamed at her.  
  
Harry opened his mouth to apologize for his partner, but Ginny charged in first, and the way her eyes flashed reminded him that she could take care of herself. He sat back with his own cup of tea and watched.  
  
“Of course I know something about him,” Ginny said. “That he’s loyal and good and would never do anything worthy of bringing himself to Auror attention. That’s what.” She picked up her own cup and swallowed so much tea that Harry thought steam would shoot out her ears like it would with a Pepper-Up Potion.  
  
“That’s not what we meant,” Harry began.  
  
Ginny spun on him, and Harry banged his knees on the table with how fast he tried to sit up. “It’s what he means,” she said, quiet, dangerous, jerking her head at Draco. “It’s the kind of thing he always means, because he can’t give up this stupid grudge that he thinks lies between our families.”  
  
“How many of our ancestors would agree with me and not you?” Draco asked the ceiling.  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Ginny said, though now she was glaring at some point between them, not directly at them. Harry didn’t think that was much of an improvement. “I’ve left that behind me. I don’t hate you, Malfoy. But I won’t help you with whatever grudge you have against Michael, either.”  
  
“It’s not a grudge,” Harry said, wishing that both of them would think about what they had really come here for. “We found his name written at the scene of the crime that Draco told you about, Ginny.” It seemed better, at the moment, to skip the details of exactly how his name was written. “We’re trying to find out what’s going on, and we have so few other clues. Do you know if he knew anyone named Adriana Lugar?”  
  
Ginny looked blank. “No. Should he?”  
  
“That’s who died,” Draco said. “The one flayed alive, held there being cut and struggling for her life the whole time, and the one who—”  
  
“ _Fine_ ,” Ginny snapped, and held up a hand as though she could ward back the words. “Why come talk to me?”  
  
“We thought you could tell us some things that we should know before we interviewed him,” Harry said, telling Draco with a glance that he should shut up and let Harry handle this. Of course, he had tried to tell Draco that in the past with  _very_ little effect. Draco shrugged amiably at him and sipped at his tea. Harry tried to ignore the slurping sound at his back as he appealed to Ginny. “Whether he knew her. Whether he was involved in the business of a correspondence course for Squibs at all. We’re afraid that he might be the next victim. Nothing to do with the case right now, but if whoever this is tracks him down…”  
  
Ginny played with the teacup for a moment. Harry knew it was time to keep silent, and let her make the decision. But yes, it had been the right idea to come here. There was  _something_ going on, although Harry thought it likely they wouldn’t know what until they had spoken to Corner himself.  
  
“All right,” Ginny said abruptly. “I don’t know where he is right now. He left the country a year ago. He firecalls me occasionally and says he’s in Paris, or Brussels, or Budapest. But any owl I send to him always comes back unopened. Some of the things he says frighten me. That’s all I know.”  
  
Draco caught Harry’s eye. Harry caught it right back, because this time he didn’t know what silent message Draco wanted to convey, and smiled at Ginny. “Thank you. Do you know why he left?”  
  
Ginny shrugged. “He said that England was suffering from the ruins of the war, and he wanted to find a place that wasn’t so ruined.”  
  
“Many people have said that.” Draco said in his blandest voice. “Though, generally, people who left in the years immediately after the war, instead of waiting until eleven years afterwards.”  
  
Ginny’s look should have shamed him, or fried him. But Draco had a thick skin relative to both of those, and did some more tea-sipping. Ginny hopped around in her seat to face Harry. “Are you going to let him keep doing that?” she asked.  
  
“Questioning you?” Harry sighed. “Sorry, Ginny. I know he’s obnoxious, but he does have a point. That’s the kind of thing I’ve heard said a lot, to the point that the  _Prophet_ uses it as a cliché. Are you sure that it would be true in Michael’s case? Or do you think he was using it as an excuse?”  
  
Ginny pulled strands of hair away from her face as she considered. “Is he going to get in trouble?”  
  
“Perhaps,” Draco said. “We don’t know what he’s done yet.”  
  
Harry punched Draco in the shoulder, and didn’t care if Ginny saw him doing it. “We don’t know. But he might be in trouble if he doesn’t come back. We’re not the only Aurors in the Socrates Corps, and the Ministry could pull us off this case and put someone else on it if they thought that we were trying to protect him, or something like that.”  
  
Ginny watched him with a broad, cynical face, and then snorted. “That’s not what you think, Harry. You think that he knows something, and you want him back so you can question him yourself.”  
  
“Or we want a holiday on the Continent.” Harry smiled at her and leaned forwards to touch her hand. She whisked it out of reach. Harry closed his hand and dropped it down at his side so that he wouldn’t look stupid by leaving it to dangle in midair. “Ginny. Look. I  _do_ want to be fair to him. But his name turning up at a crime scene like this is a hell of a coincidence. It might be, for all I know. Or he could be the twisted’s next victim, and in that case, he’s probably somewhere where we can’t get at him and protect him in time without more information. But we can’t know anything about what it really means until we talk to him.”  
  
Ginny picked at the knees of her trousers for a moment. Then she turned and walked to the other side of the room, pulling a drawer in a small cabinet open. Harry relaxed. She would give them  _something,_ although how useful that thing would prove to be, he couldn’t know until he’d had a chance to use it.  
  
“Here’s the last Floo address I had for him,” Ginny said, coming back with a scrap of parchment in her looping hand. Harry took it, memorized the directions in case something happened to them, and slid the parchment into his pocket. “You’d better not use it to antagonize him the way you did me.”  
  
“We’ll be approaching him as at least a potential suspect,” Harry reminded her, and stood up to nod his thanks. Touching her right now didn’t sound like a good idea, both because of the way she had reacted before and the way that Draco was quietly bubbling beside him. “It’s going to be different, one way or the other. Thank you, Ginny. I mean that.”  
  
“You can show your thanks by getting out of here and not showing back up with  _him_ ever again,” Ginny said, not even looking at Draco, and whipped around to storm back into the kitchen.  
  
Draco opened his mouth. Harry seized his arm. Draco looked him in the eye, and that was enough to make Harry release him.  
  
“I’m perfectly willing to let him visit you without me in the future,” Draco told her, his voice so cold that Harry knew he was going someplace dangerous despite how good his words sounded on the surface. “Now that I know he isn’t interested in you, and that only confirms he would rather date me.”  
  
Ginny paused. Harry was sure that he could hear all three of their heartbeats in that moment. Or maybe it was only his, thumping so crazily that he felt as though someone was running towards him.   
  
Ginny turned around instead of running, and her face was more closed than it had been when she first opened the door. “Harry?” she asked.  
  
Harry licked his lips. This wasn’t the way he’d wanted his friends to find out, but they had to know sometime. “Yeah,” he said. “Draco and I are partners, and—partners.”  
  
Ginny just turned her back and walked away again. Harry closed his eyes. He would have felt better if she had shouted at him.  
  
“That went well,” Draco said aloud.  
  
Harry just nodded to him and walked out of Ginny’s house. Discussing it in front of her wouldn’t do anything to heal the wound that he was afraid he had just inflicted between Ginny and himself. Walk, and breathe, and think about the fact that she had treated them with suspicion from the moment they appeared, and maybe it would hurt less soon.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke suddenly, his hand on his wand. He turned his head from side to side, slow, minute movements that any intruder might mistake for someone settling deeper into sleep.  
  
But he sensed nothing, certainly nothing that would require a wand. Harry’s home was simply older and creakier than any building he was used to sleeping in, and he woke like this with the conviction that he had to hurt someone.  
  
He laid his wand on the bedside table and turned over to regard Harry.  
  
Harry lay with his head turned away, his body hunched around his curled fists. Draco reached over his shoulder and smoothed his fingers up and down the fist, trying to persuade it to unclench. Harry stirred, but it was only to move further away and not closer. Maybe he had slept alone for so long that he didn’t know how to do anything else, Draco thought. He knew that Harry had never actually slept with Lionel Vane, and as for relationships before then, perhaps the last one had been Ginny Weasley.  
  
 _Who had something to hide, however little Harry wanted to believe it._  
  
Draco stood up, stretched, cast a Warming Charm on his bare skin so he wouldn’t have to dress, and padded through the bedroom to the kitchen. Harry rarely made himself anything more complicated than toast, but that changed when Draco stayed over, because Draco refused to let his standard of living sink. He had done without house-elves for seven years, which made for some intense learning of charms.  
  
As he began to crack eggs now, his mind wandered back to Weasley. He didn’t think that his initial suspicion had foundation; she didn’t seem interested in Harry. But she had stiffened up before she realized they were dating. She had looked away from them and hadn’t looked as pleased to see Harry as Draco would have thought she would, even if he  _was_ there visiting her in an official capacity.  
  
What was she hiding?  
  
As Draco cast the charm that Transfigured a spoon into a whisk, and the second one that would set it going constantly without the need for human intervention, one possibility came to him. That Corner had fled for a crime he was afraid would implicate Weasley. Draco had checked the files when they returned to the Ministry and found nothing on Corner, but if he had fled, he could have taken the evidence with him.  
  
Harry had used the Floo address, after a long argument over which one of them should. Draco had pointed out that he might be able to question Corner with the greater efficiency, but Harry had pointed out that Corner was unlikely to open the Floo at all for someone he still considered an enemy.   
  
Harry won, and used it. The fireplace revealed a confused young woman who talked to them in French, which Draco had to translate. She knew nothing about Corner, and as far as Draco could tell, that was genuine, not a cover-up for a hidden lover.  
  
The eggs had reached the point where he could begin on the toast. At neat motions of Draco’s wand, the bread rose into the air and began to flip itself back and forth over a conjured flame. He watched it brown.  
  
Did Corner’s crime have anything to do with the twisted hunting him?  
  
Possibly. That was the problem with knowing so little about this twisted, Draco thought. He might want Corner for an insane reason, or because Corner knew Adriana or was associated with her somehow. Corner might  _be_ the twisted. The crime Corner had committed before going abroad might have nothing to do with it.  
  
The toast was nicely browned. Draco checked on the progress of the eggs and began to brew coffee, which Harry preferred in the mornings for some reason.   
  
Either way, Draco accepted that they would get no more information from Weasley. She would shut her mouth to him, and to Harry since she knew that anything she told Harry would get to Draco. And if she was the sort of wizard to stay loyal to someone who had committed a serious crime simply because she knew him, then there was little chance of her suddenly cracking and deciding to tell the truth.  
  
Draco paused on that thought. Wouldn’t he stay loyal to Harry if Harry had committed a crime, simply because Draco knew him?  
  
Draco shrugged a moment later. That was different, because  _he_ would know it, and he would know what Harry’s motives and actions for. In this case, he had no idea. Corner could deserve the loyalty, or not, or have nothing to do with the crime. But the longer Weasley kept her mouth shut, the more suspicious it was.  
  
All things considered, Draco thought they should go talk to Lugar’s business partner next. She was the one who was most likely to know some of the truths they were seeking. She could start by verifying whether the blood the twisted had inked on Lugar’s skin contained the truth or only a fantasy.  
  
Harry hadn’t got up yet, and he usually did once the smell of coffee began to infect the house. Draco turned and called his name, keeping one eye on the eggs. It had taken him a long time to master scrambled eggs, and even now, they still sometimes stuck to the bottom of the pan.  
  
Harry didn’t respond. Draco set the cup of coffee down silently on the table and began to pad towards the bedroom.  
  
Harry screamed. Draco began to run.  
  
He got there in time to find Harry sitting up in the sheets, shivering, his arms wrapped around himself. He turned his head as Draco came up and said hoarsely, “I saw the twisted murder someone else.”  
  
Draco nodded without speaking. That was Harry’s Dark gift, the one that he insisted on comparing to a flaw in the twisted. Draco began to pull on his uniform robes. “Where?” he asked, once he had his head through the collar.  
  
Harry’s hand was still on his neck. Draco hid a wince. Harry’s gift gave him visions of murders—always and only murders, not anything else, and he experienced the pain that the victim did. In this case, the twisted must have started cutting there.  
  
“Hogsmeade,” Harry said. “The Three Broomsticks.” He gave Draco a weak smile. “Thanks for making breakfast, but I don’t think I could eat right now.”  
  
Draco nodded back. He was glad for his own empty stomach. “Then get dressed, and let’s go.”


	4. Scene of the Crime

Draco came out of the Apparition crouching, his wand extended before him, his muscles tensed in a way that made Harry’s heart and throat ache. He half-wished that Draco didn’t have to do this, that he didn’t have to put his life in danger and that they weren’t Aurors, that Draco could have a morning unbroken by Harry’s visions—  
  
But then they would never have met, and Draco wouldn’t consent to be left behind when Harry dashed into dangerous missions. Harry swallowed down his melancholy and paid attention to what was in front of him, even though the vision of the murder had already shown him where they would need to go. He only saw the moment of death, not what happened after. The twisted could still be here.  
  
Most of Hogsmeade was silent, as it tended to be in the early mornings. Harry let his attention spread out and could smell tea, opening flowers, something strong and spicy from the direction of the apothecary. He heard no shouts or screams. He nodded. The twisted had managed the kill silently, which fit with what he had seen in the vision.  
  
He touched Draco’s shoulder and gestured ahead. Draco flowed ahead of him like a stream of silk, and Harry followed, looking up at the windows. He thought he knew what room the victim had died in, but he couldn’t be sure.  
  
He scrubbed at his cheeks and hands for a moment as a sensation of filth crawled over him. How was he really better than the twisted, when it came right down to it? Their powers slaughtered people, deprived them of their memories or their magic, took them apart for the pleasure and amusement of someone insane. But Harry’s powers invaded a victim’s last moments and showed him things that the victims would probably have preferred to die without showing to anyone.  
  
He remembered Draco’s answer to that, in the Forest of Dean, as they lay side by side.  _You didn’t kill anyone._  
  
Harry swallowed shakily. That was probably still a pretty good dividing line.  
  
Draco tensed ahead of him. Harry shifted to the side, hip touching hip, to let him know he was there. Draco closed his eyes and held his left arm up in front of him.  
  
And that was Draco’s gift, or flaw to use the terms the Ministry put them in, sensing Dark magic. His Mark would burn and alert him when that happened. Harry waited silently. Draco might be able to tell whether the twisted was still there or not.  
  
Draco opened his eyes and screamed, and at the same moment, the door opened.  
  
*  
  
Draco had never felt the pain that assaulted him through the Mark before. This was burning oil, scalding water, and his arm was plunged to the shoulder in it. He shook and screamed again, and felt Harry pushing him to the ground at the same moment as something whirled in front of him and struck out at head height.  
  
Draco rolled on the ground, cradling his left arm close to him, trying to see the battle and respond to his training and attend to the pain all at once. Another flashing thing cut at him, a sooty arm holding a curved blade, and he knew that he would have died if Harry hadn’t flung himself in between, using his shoulder to divert the blade.  
  
For once, Draco wasn’t even inclined to shout about how Harry shouldn’t have risked his life for him. This wasn’t needless.  
  
Draco sat up, still cradling his arm, and saw Harry fighting something in front of him. The figure was extraordinarily hard to focus on. It flickered and shimmered from one shape to another, and sometimes Draco thought he saw a flying cloud of soot, other times of pieces of paper circulating around each other, and other times of a man in a mirrored mask and long black cloak that wrapped his body in sightless folds.  
  
Then the figure broke away from Harry and ran. Harry tried to cast a spell that would trip it up, but the soft  _pop_ of Apparition was final.  
  
Harry swore and knelt down beside Draco. “How badly are you hurt?” he gasped. “I thought he cut you before I could get there.”  
  
Draco shook his head and felt at his arm. No, there was nothing there. And now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure that he had seen a blade at all, just another aspect of the twisted’s illusory guise.  
  
“Let’s go find out what he left,” he said grimly, standing up, “since we don’t have any idea where he went.”  
  
He winced as he shifted his left arm, and of course Harry didn’t miss that. It was impossible to think that he would, Draco decided. Harry traced his fingers lightly through the air above the cloth that hid the Dark Mark, and looked steadily at Draco.  
  
“I can go on,” Draco said, and Harry hesitated once more, then nodded and turned towards the Three Broomsticks. Draco smiled at his back. Harry wouldn’t have taken his word for it three months ago.  
  
They found a few dazed people who’d been on the ground floor having breakfast, and tried to interview them. They hadn’t seen more than Harry and Draco had, though. Someone dressed in shadows or smoke. Some said they’d heard a scream, but only one scream. And Madam Rosmerta, holding herself stiffly at the sight of Draco, said that she didn’t know who the person had been, and hadn’t seen him enter the inn.  
  
Harry made a sign with one hand low down by Draco’s hip, and Draco nodded. It was useless trying to ask these people anything else. They had to go find out what was waiting in one of the upper rooms.  
  
“We’re sorry,” Harry told Madam Rosmerta gently. “But we think someone was murdered here.”  
  
While Rosmerta screamed and shrieked and absorbed Harry’s attention by fainting, Draco cocked his head to the side. Something else had occurred to him, something so basic that he should have thought of it during the fight.  
  
Why had the twisted run from them, and dealt in illusion, rather than using his flaw? There was no way to block having your skin stripped out of you that Draco knew of.  
  
He touched the Dark Mark on his arm where no one could see it, and wondered.  
  
*  
  
When they finally saw the room, it was as awful as Harry had expected. He held a bit of wadded cloth to his nose while Draco briskly threw open the windows, admitting both light so they could see what they were doing and noise from below. Harry set a shimmering, invisible ward across the door that would increase the stink of blood outside the room. That might keep anyone from interfering at first.  
  
Draco glanced up at the whisper of magic across his Dark Mark, and his smile twisted. “Why, Auror Potter,” he murmured. “What would Deputy Head Okazes say if he knew you were using Dark Arts?”  
  
“He wouldn’t say anything, because I would have already shoved his head up his arse for complaining,” Harry said briskly back, and crouched down next to his partner, glad to hear Draco laugh, even if it was a shivery sound. He touched Draco’s back, moving his hand in a slow circle. “How are you doing?”  
  
“As well as you are,” Draco said, lifting his head. “I know that you haven’t seen more  _gruesome_ crime scenes than I have.”  
  
Harry only nodded, and held his peace. Both of them had “won” assignment to the Socrates Corps because of cases they had worked dealing with Dark magic and grotesque crimes, cases that had killed their former partners, but Draco’s case was sealed as an official secret and Harry still couldn’t bear to talk about the creature that he had slain. There was no way to prove or disprove Draco’s statement. “Any sign of the symbol or the companions?” he asked, studying the skin pinned to the bed.  
  
It looked much the same as Adriana’s had, but in person was worse than the pictures, of course. Harry breathed through his mouth and stepped close enough to read the writing in blood that twisted and writhed all across the skin like a growth of alien vines.  
  
 _michael moxon regretted never visiting the muggle world has no regrets in the name of love slept with valerie turner for two years said that he wanted to sleep with a man but was joking considered applying to the aurors admired and envied the ministry believed in a mysterious and personal god…  
  
_ And on and on the blood flowed, the words, the secrets of a life taken and turned inside-out. Harry reared his head back when he could take no more and studied the skin for signs of the viscera blobs that had attached Adriana’s flesh to the wall. No sign of them. Perhaps the twisted hadn’t felt the need for them when the bed was a flat surface.  
  
“Look.” Draco’s voice shook a little. Harry turned and saw that he was holding the camera he had used to take pictures in Adriana’s flat.   
  
But his finger pointed at something else. Harry looked, and discovered the symbol of the scroll on the hem of the bedsheets, this time made of crushed organs in a thick paste—it  _had_ to be crushed organs, from the smell of them and the color of the liquid—and easier to read. It bore two words instead of one.  
  
 _OFFER SARAH._  
  
Harry nodded. “I think these are the names of the victims,” he said as calmly as he could. “Not Michael Corner, but ‘corner Michael.’ This skin says that the victim’s name was Michael.” He felt guilt hammering on his brow like heatstroke, but did his best not to give it credence. He couldn’t have known, and Draco, whom Harry was accustomed to thinking of as a lot smarter than he was, hadn’t known, either.  
  
Draco nodded, his face blank. “I think you’re right. We’ll  _look_ for someone named Sarah Offer, but otherwise, we only have the first name to go on.” His face hardened, his nostrils flared, and Harry saw the frustration that he knew Draco would conceal from everyone else in the Department, even the other Socrates Aurors. “I don’t know how we can save them if we only have the first names. How many people are there in the wizarding world named Michael and Sarah?”  
  
Harry pressed flat on Draco’s shoulder with the palm of his hand. “And even half-bloods who returned to the Muggle world, or Squibs,” he added.  
  
“You’re  _not_ helping.” Draco jerked his head like he was biting a thread off with his teeth.  
  
He relaxed a moment later, though, and Harry understood that he’d been understood. Draco knew someone else shared his frustration, and sometimes, that was the best thing a partner could offer.  
  
“Pictures,” Draco said, standing up, holding the camera in a posture that Harry reckoned was the best one—he knew nothing about photography, really, and hadn’t wanted to learn, after Colin—and beginning to click. “Detailed ones, this time, ones that we won’t have to rely on other people to give us.”  
  
Harry nodded, pressed Draco’s shoulder one more time, and turned around to scan the room again. There were no books here, which might mean the twisted had left no companions lurking, but since they knew so little about his powers yet, Harry wasn’t going to discount it until he had examined every item in the room.  
  
It turned out he had to Levitate them one by one with his wand and peer at them from a distance, though. The sheets, the shelves, the table, the glasses that Michael Moxon had apparently owned, his robes draped over a chair for tomorrow—today—had been so soaked with blood that Harry couldn’t bring himself to touch them.  
  
Those items told him nothing. Harry particularly looked for any paper that might bear Adriana Lugar’s name or a connection to her business, and found none. He closed his eyes and shook his head.  
  
“We will catch him. We nearly caught him today.”  
  
Draco spoke behind Harry’s shoulder. Harry leaned back, knowing Draco would catch him, and briefly squeezed his hand. Draco bowed his head and closed his eyes, letting his hair and his skin touch Harry’s.  
  
“I know,” Harry said. “When I feel helpless, I can rely on you.” He stood up and moved out of the way so that Draco could snap more pictures of the blood-soaked objects, and made himself continue reading the story in blood on Moxon’s skin. At least it didn’t seem to claim that he had no relatives left, the way Adriana’s did. That meant they might have more people left to interview.  
  
*  
  
“No luck?”  
  
Draco glanced up. He had come alone to the office to put their evidence away, while Harry went home to rest. He and Harry had argued about how they should divide their labor, and Harry had wanted to come with him at the least, but he was more shaken than he would admit from the aftereffects of Moxon’s death, and Draco’s agony from the Dark Mark was over quickly.   
  
So he was the only one who saw the complex expression on Macgeorge’s face as she sat at her desk, watching him lay the photographs and files on the desk.  
  
Draco shrugged and chose the appropriate drawers to put them in. “Another murder.” He kept half his attention on her and half on the evidence. It seemed odd that she was here at all hours lately, and without her partner. Draco was not stupid enough to think that that connected to  _their_ case somehow, but he wanted to know the answer. Macgeorge was pure-blood, like him, and Dark, like him, and had a flaw, like him. “Just like the last one. An inoffensive person, one who apparently had never done anything objectionable in his life.” They had interviewed Moxon’s parents and one of his sisters so far. Shock, grief, anger, but no signals like the ones Draco had received from Weasley, indicating that she had been lying. Another dead end.  
  
“I might be able to help.”  
  
That was so far from what Draco had expected Macgeorge to say that his hands froze on the papers, and he turned around to stare at her. Macgeorge promptly flushed all up and down her throat and turned her head away with a flap of her hand. “Unless you distrust me for some reason,” she said bitterly. “No reason why you should, but no reason why you shouldn’t, either, I reckon.”  
  
“I didn’t expect you to offer,” Draco said. “And you know that I distrust the way you asked me questions about my interest in Harry before we began dating.” Sometimes, direct was the best way to disconcert someone like Macgeorge—someone like himself.  
  
Macgeorge glanced back at him. “I wondered what you meant to do with him. There was a time when I had the childish crush that so many people of our generation did on Potter. But not now,” she added, probably because she could see the tide rising in Draco’s eyes. “Working closely with him has taught me that he’s a lot more damaged than I want to deal with.”  
  
Draco nodded stiffly, and made a mental note to make sure that Harry didn’t have any unsupervised time with Macgeorge in the office for the next few weeks. “How do you think you could help with this case?”  
  
Macgeorge glanced once at the door of the office. Draco flicked his wand and raised the buried rank of wards the rest of the Department didn’t know about, the ones that prevented anyone else from eavesdropping by dazing them.   
  
Macgeorge smiled, once, a smile that didn’t touch her hazel eyes. “Thank you. And I meant this.” She turned and gestured to the withered hand in a glass globe that sat on her desk, pinning down two curling sheets of parchment.   
  
The globe rose, and the fingers curled inwards to the palm of the hand. When they uncurled again, they clutched a thin sheet of skin that Draco was sure hadn’t been there before. Macgeorge unscrewed the glass top of the paperweight, and Draco’s wand crossed his chest without his conscious volition. He realized that he was sniffing for the scent of dead things, but there was no rot, no decay. Only Macgeorge, and that hand, and the thin strip it held and which she lifted up and stared at.  
  
A moment later, she shook her head. “It doesn’t have enough information on the case to help me yet,” she said, turning the strip so that Draco could see it. “Perhaps I should speak to the dead by looking at their bodies.”  
  
Draco stared. The strip wasn’t skin after all, but a thin, yellow-brown parchment. The letters that lay on it were the proper dark of ink, not red like the blood that their twisted had used to write out Lugar’s and Moxon’s stories on their bodies. The writing said _Inconclusive evidence._  
  
“What is this?” Draco asked, and looked back at Macgeorge.  
  
“I know what I am,” Macgeorge said, and her hands flexed once, as if imitating the dead one. Draco told himself that he wasn’t squeamish, but he was relieved anyway when she remembered the open paperweight and closed the glass globe down to encase the hand again. “A woman with a Dark gift that could become the flaw of a twisted if I pushed it hard enough or went mad studying the Dark Arts.”  
  
Draco stared, and Macgeorge laughed, her nostrils pinching shut in a look that Draco had seen often on his father’s face. “Did you think that you were the only one who could figure something like that out? No. Especially since  _I_ had the patience to look through testaments by former Socrates Aurors.”  
  
“The corps was only formed recently,” Draco said. “Harry and I went as far back through the historical records as we could, but it’s difficult to identify twisted when the records don’t call them that.”  
  
Macgeorge smiled, slowly enough that Draco had to watch her smile spill across her face like boiling water. “Is  _that_ what you think? How innocent.”  
  
Draco waited, but she said nothing to explain what she meant, so he snapped his head down and said, “Your flaw is necromancy. I know that. But the Ministry also punishes anyone for practicing that, wandless or not.”  
  
Macgeorge rolled her eyes. “As though you haven’t done enough Dark Arts to condemn anyone not in our…unique positions.” A flick of her eyelids indicated the wards that glowed on the door of the office. “I know exactly what the Ministry punishes, and how secret I need to keep this. I’m offering to help anyway.”  
  
“Why?” Draco asked. “Other people have died on our other cases, You haven’t used it then.”  
  
Macgeorge shook her head. “The only twisted you’ve pursued since Isla and I joined the Corps didn’t kill people. I reserved my magic for our own cases, and I think that Isla and I get results, if not as often as you do, since the Ministry reserves the choice tidbits for their most infamous pair.”  
  
Draco bit off the retort that he could have made. It was true that he hadn’t paid as much attention to Rudie and Macgeorge’s cases as he should have, and hadn’t sensed any use of necromancy, or even that she was studying twisted and what might cause someone to become one. He would have to look more closely at his fellow Aurors.  
  
“Very well,” he said. “But we already had to give the bodies back, so you can’t have as much access to them as I’d like. The first victim has already been buried. It might still be possible to reach Moxon’s. The victim who died today,” he added, when Macgeorge turned her head to the side.  
  
Macgeorge nodded and stood. “If he died today, then I can look forward to an interesting conversation.”  
  
Draco briefly checked his watch. The holding cell for the body was in the Ministry, and Harry should be asleep. He thought it wouldn’t distress Harry unduly if he went with Macgeorge to that holding cell and tried to find out what the dead would say to her.  
  
“Let’s go, then,” he said, and set out with Macgeorge walking at his side. It was weirdly unlike the way he walked with Harry, and he found himself outpacing her, putting more distance than he meant to between them. Macgeorge called irritably after him, and a few people in the corridors turned around and stared.  
  
Draco ignored the flush that mantled his cheeks. So this would start new rumors about him dating someone else, cheating on Harry. Any action they took would cause rumors, when they were both well-known. He had to admit that and work with it, instead of trying to conceal it.  
  
Those rumors wouldn’t have the chance to reach Harry, anyway, since Draco intended to explain everything to him this evening.  
  
*  
  
Harry woke up when his Floo chimed. He lay there for a few moments, fuzzy-headed and licking at the fuzz that also seemed to have accumulated on the inside of his gums. Shouldn’t Draco have been back by now? Or had he overestimated the amount of time he’d been asleep?  
  
The Floo chimed again, and it wasn’t its usual sound. Harry stood up and staggered out into the drawing room, taking care that he wore a shirt and trousers before he did so. There had been a few  _incidents_ with his friends since Draco had started staying over. Draco had enthusiastic hands and no idea of his own strength.  
  
The face hovering in the fire made Harry pause immediately, his hands on the sides of the doorframe. As far as he knew, that wasn’t a face that should be there, not only because it belonged to a person who had nothing to say to him but because he had never opened his Floo to allow access.  
  
“Mrs. Malfoy,” he said, with some difficulty, when she went on looking at him and said nothing. “What do you want?”  
  
“A glimpse of my son,” Mrs. Malfoy said, leaning forwards as if resting her elbows on a shelf in front of her. She probably did have one, for long Floo calls, Harry thought. After some of the things Draco had mentioned about his childhood, no luxury in Malfoy Manor would surprise him, Harry thought. “But I will settle for talking to you instead. Has Draco told you that we aided him in his last case?”  
  
Harry stared at her. Then he said, “What? He took—I know he brought someone to you. But that doesn’t sound like helping to  _me_.”  
  
Mrs. Malfoy gave him a smile that glittered with diamond edges. “Oh, dear, is that what he told you? In reality, we had contacted him a few days before, and told him that we wanted him back, as our son and heir. The price, at the time, was dropping you.”  
  
Harry snorted, and had the satisfaction of seeing her stiff face wrinkle like crumpled paper. “Well, excuse me for believing that he’d never accept such a bargain. If you thought he would, then you really don’t know him at all. And you should know someone you plan to make your heir, don’t you think?”  
  
Mrs. Malfoy spent some time looking at him, and then nodded. “One should. And how much better should one know someone who is one’s intimate partner, guarding one’s back in danger and one’s sex life in bed?”  
  
Harry hated the blush that crept up his neck, but he managed to grin at her. “I think you mean that I don’t know Draco, but I do. Unless I lost the sense of the sentence with all those ‘ones’ you kept throwing in there.”  
  
“Did you know that Draco went and spoke to your former partner, Lauren Hale?” Mrs. Malfoy smiled calmly at him. “And that he promised to honor our requests and become our heir again, with no balking at the price, if we would help him with the woman that he brought to our home? Such a pity that his father was gone at the time. He would have known how much Draco was lying.”  
  
“Yes, he  _was_ lying,” Harry snapped. “He came back to me.”  
  
But inwardly, his stomach cramped. Draco had spoken to Hale? He had never told Harry that.  
  
And his parents had wanted him to drop Harry, and he had agreed? Even in pretense? That was—it had worked out, but it was still disturbing.  
  
Mrs. Malfoy bowed her head to Harry, the light gleaming off the silver necklace around her throat. “You might consider what he could be doing now,” she whispered, “so late in the evening, without coming home to you.”  
  
Her face vanished, and the fire flickered calmly to itself.   
  
Harry hesitated. Then he picked up a handful of Floo powder. 


	5. Secrets of the Dead

“It stinks.”  
  
Draco nodded and refrained from saying the many things he could have said. He stepped back from the folding shelf on which Moxon’s skin was draped and waited for Macgeorge to draw closer so that she could conduct whatever necromantic rituals she wanted to on it. Draco didn’t think they would be interrupted. No one was in haste to spend  _that_ much time around the skin, and Macgeorge’s wandless magic would give the Ministry some trouble to track, the same way that they didn’t have Harry registered as a Seer because his visions simply happened to him, without the aid of a crystal ball or any other tool.  
  
But Macgeorge didn’t step closer to the shelf. She simply stood, one hand to her nose, looking so stricken that Draco shifted his weight.  
  
That got her to move, though whether she feared criticism or feared being made fun of Draco didn’t know. She crouched down by the edge of the shelf and shut her eyes, splaying her fingers above the bloody letters. Two quick breaths in and out, and then she wasn’t breathing at all.  
  
Draco stood up, but held himself back. He remembered reading about this, in one of the books on necromancy that he’d glanced into during the year that the Dark Lord spent in the Manor, when anything would have been of value as a distraction. Some necromancers got closer to their subjects by making themselves like the dead for the duration of the ritual. No breathing, or no heartbeat, or no motion.  
  
In this case, it seemed breathing was the only one Macgeorge was going to stop, and even that didn’t last long. Her eyes opened again, fixed on the wall above the shelf, and a rasping voice Draco had never heard said, “Who did you see?”  
  
The skin shivered once. Then a long strip that had been the side of a finger peeled away, and kept peeling, all down the flank of the finger, the side of the knuckle, the width of a hand, until Draco thought it had blended into the arm. But his rising gorge wouldn’t let him keep exact track of that, and he had to glance away and take a few deep breaths until he got it under control.  
  
When he turned back, the strip of skin hung like a banner above the shelf, in front of Macgeorge, and she was bending closer to read the writing on it. Draco tried, but from this distance, it simply looked like random smudges of smoke and soot.  
  
Macgeorge nodded. “And is the truth written in your blood?”  
  
Another strip of skin peeled loose, this time from the opposite hand. When it draped over the first one, to form a cross shape, it was close enough that Draco could read a few of the words.  _Truth and unregarded._  
  
Macgeorge nodded again, which seemed to be a kind of control gesture for the pieces of skin. Her breath gargled in her lungs, and that was when Draco noticed the tension of her muscles. Using her flaw like this seemed to take the kind of toll on her that his visions did on Harry.  
  
“I can ask only one more question,” she warned Draco in an undertone.  
  
Draco stopped the irritated words that wanted to rise to his lips. If he had known that, he would have asked her to make her first two questions more relevant. He thought, while the strips of skin hovered and Macgeorge fought whatever wanted to consume her with trembling muscles.  
  
“Ask why the killer was using such  _Dark_ magic, why it was different from other Dark magic,” he said at last. He could have asked whether Moxon knew the killer, but that was probably covered by Macgeorge’s first question, and he was curious, intensely so, about the way his Mark had hurt when they briefly dueled the twisted.  
  
Macgeorge blinked, human. “You’re sure?”  
  
Draco nodded. Macgeorge turned back to face the corpse, and quivered briefly, as though someone had jammed a pole down through her throat and affixed her to the floor. Draco grimaced and looked in the other direction for a moment. This case was definitely affecting the grotesqueness of the metaphors in which he thought.  
  
A third strip of skin came loose, but slowly, as though Macgeorge was having to fight Moxon’s spirit for control of it. The letters began to form, though, which was what Draco wanted. He leaned forwards to see if he could read them himself.  
  
Halfway through the scroll of unfolding words, the skin abruptly shredded, tearing into smaller and smaller pieces. Draco swore. The explosion of magic that briefly shimmered in the holding cell made his arm hurt.   
  
Even that satisfied him in part, though. It seemed that their twisted knew about the possibility that someone might use necromancy on his victim and had protected himself against that.  
  
Which only brought up more questions, but ones that might be more productive.  _Who_ would be suspicious enough to think of necromancy? The Ministry allowed the use of some other magic it restricted, such as Legilimency, under tightly controlled circumstances, but necromancy had never been allowed.  
  
Unless it was someone who knew the Socrates Corps, who might know about Macgeorge’s flaw and her developing gift…  
  
Draco turned to Macgeorge, ready to ask who knew about her flaw, or whether she had managed to read anything on that third strip of skin before it dissolved. He found her lying on the floor, neck twisted towards the shelf, a few thin pale bubbles trailing out of her mouth and coating her tongue. He swore again and dropped to his knees beside her, taking out his wand, ready to cast an  _Rennervate._  
  
And that was how the door burst open, how Harry found them.  
  
*  
  
Draco was kneeling beside Macgeorge, who had something thick and disgusting and white flowing down her chin. He stared up at Harry for a moment, then said, “Well? She fainted when she was trying to read the truth about the twisted from Moxon’s corpse. Help me revive her.”  
  
Harry frowned and knelt down beside him, but said nothing. He had gone first to the Socrates office, thinking Draco would be there, or that he would bump into him on the way back. Or maybe he would even get there and Draco would owl him demanding to know where he was, since he would have reached Harry’s house by then.  
  
Instead, Harry had found all too many people who were delighted to tell him exactly where and how they had seen Draco and Macgeorge walking, and how they had looked very  _close,_ their heads bent together in conspiracy.  
  
Harry had reminded himself all the way down the corridor to the holding cell that those rumors still came from who he was, and who Draco was, not because they were true. Too much delighted glee in the eyes of the rumor-mongers, for one thing. These were people who would never have wanted  _that_ much to do him a good turn.  
  
But it was still a relief, stupid as it was to admit, for him to see the bubbles on Macgeorge’s tongue. Draco wouldn’t have wanted to fuck someone who spat up like that.  
  
“Using her necromantic flaw?” Harry murmured, holding out his wand and clasping Draco’s hand. Draco started, and Harry smiled at him. “I find it easier to focus my magic on helping someone else when I’m like this,” he explained easily. “And of course she was. That’s much easier to hide than magic done with a wand.”  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, eyes still narrowed as though Harry had been the one to do something weird in coming here and preparing to revive Macgeorge, instead of him. “Yes, she was. And then she collapsed when she pulled the third strip of skin free, the one that would have contained the answer about why the twisted’s magic was so bloody Dark.”  
  
Harry swallowed and kept his head turned carefully away from the corpse. “Oh.”   
  
He and Draco chanted the  _Rennervate_ together, and magic flowed back and forth between them along their linked fingers. A moment later, Macgeorge coughed and stirred weakly to life, rolling her head to the side so that she could spit out the thicker bubbles that came up. Not just bubbles, froth, Harry thought, smelling of sour cheese.  
  
At least he had the satisfaction of seeing Draco recoil at that. Draco didn’t like strong smells of any kind, and the one coming from Macgeorge was particularly disgusting.  
  
Harry decided accusations and questions right now would be counterproductive. He leaned back, instead, and let Macgeorge decide how she was going to react to seeing him.  
  
It turned out to be a blank stare, and then she turned to Draco and went on speaking as though Harry was a natural extension of Draco’s presence. “So. The corpse saw nothing except a figure of soot and shadow, and the story written on his skin in blood is the truth. The word ‘unregarded’ appeared several times in that answer.”   
  
“Why?” Draco asked, as serious as though he expected to take up necromancy in the near future. Harry rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Draco looked at him anyway and moved his fingers up and down his wand.  
  
“The dead don’t tend to be coherent conversationalists,” Macgeorge said, and spat out a bit more cheese-like substance that hit the floor and sparked. Draco rose to his feet, finally, and moved away. Harry moved with him, making sure that he kept himself a pace behind Draco, in a good strike position. “They repeat themselves, talk about details that others wouldn’t notice, and ignore some we would find obvious.” Her voice had risen now, clearer, stronger, but she still stank, and she still wasn’t looking at Harry. “This seems to mean that no one else particularly cared about those facts of his life, that he had no particular enemies or friends.”  
  
“Like Adriana,” Harry murmured.  
  
Draco gave him a single quelling look, which wasn’t enough to escape the interest from Macgeorge. “What do you mean?” she asked. “The last victim whose case you worked on? Or should I say, the first victim in this case?”  
  
Draco’s look sharpened. Harry simply blinked back, guileless.  _He trusts her enough to have her do illegal necromancy for our case, but not enough to give her publically available facts?_  
  
“Yes, Lugar was our last victim before Moxon,” Draco said at last, apparently on the realization that Macgeorge would not dissolve neatly into mist and blow out the door. He sighed and touched his hair, the ends of the strands, as though they would have had time to be ruffled during the short walk from the Socrates office.  
  
 _That’s where they must have been._  
  
Still, Harry held his tongue. He wanted to know a lot of things, including what Draco had been thinking to come here with Macgeorge, but the less of a fuss he made now, the sooner they would be out of this room and he could confront Draco in private.  
  
“I wish there was a way I could gain access to her body,” Macgeorge said, and sighed. “Even a vial of her blood would help.”  
  
“Why?” Harry felt entitled to say, and gestured at the cross made of skin-strips floating above Moxon’s corpse. “It wouldn’t enable you to read the information out from the flesh in the same way.”  
  
Macgeorge gave him a long, slow look. “Because there are other ways of talking to the dead,” she said, and shook her head at Draco. “I don’t envy you this one. Bring me the blood in the morning if you can. I’m tired.” She walked out the door without giving Draco time to decide what he would say.  
  
“I think it’s time that you came home now,” Harry said quietly.  
  
Draco pivoted on one heel to face him, light and dangerous and free. “Where? To my house? Or to yours, where you intend to treat me as if I was writhing on the floor with her?”  
  
Harry smiled, despite the heat going off like a sunrise, like a firework, inside him. At least they were getting straight to it, instead of dancing around the subject and hinting endlessly the way he thought Draco would like to. “Your mother firecalled me,” he said. “She told me that they’d promised you your old family and your old life back if you just betrayed me, and that you’d talked to Hale behind my back. Why did you never tell me about that?”  
  
*  
  
 _Shit._  
  
Draco had assumed, without thinking, that this was all about Macgeorge—and Harry’s face had turned that particular violent purple color when he saw Draco on the floor beside her, so Draco had reason. But come to think of it, that didn’t explain why Harry would have awakened from what Draco knew was a sound sleep and come rushing down to the Ministry, then to the holding cells.  
  
Draco licked his lips. “I didn’t tell you about visiting your old partner because I was jealous and we were having that unreasonable argument over whether we really needed to spare the twisted who kill people,” he said. Harry’s eyes glinted like the light off steel, but he didn’t interrupt. Draco appreciated the courtesy. “She was merciless. I don’t blame you for backing away from her. You need someone warm.”  
  
“You didn’t tell me,” Harry said quietly.  
  
“We were arguing.” Draco stood up and circled warily towards him, pausing only to wave his wand and pull the strips of skin that Macgeorge had enchanted into a small vial that he then Summoned. No use leaving them here for Ministry officials to find, and although any other Aurors who came to look at it would be able to tell that someone had taken skin off the body, Draco could truthfully claim it was their evidence.  
  
“And afterwards, when we weren’t?” Harry tilted his head to the side to watch Draco walking nearer.  
  
*  
  
“I didn’t tell you,” Draco said, weighting his words as though he assumed Harry would throw them back in his face if he didn’t, “because you would have taken it the wrong way. The same way you would have taken my parents’ request.” He paused, in body and in words, and left Harry to wait until Draco had licked his lips and said, “I never considered it seriously, you know. Abandoning you for what my parents could offer me. The moment they told me that was a condition, I knew I couldn’t do it.”  
  
“Thank you,” Harry said. It was a big concession, so he let the silence hang there for a moment between them until he added, “And telling the truth?”  
  
Draco hissed and reached out for his wrist. “Not here,” he said. “Not in a holding cell where anyone could come by.”  
  
Harry went with him, silently amused that Draco would say one of the most intimate things that he’d ever said to Harry in a holding cell but worried about an audience for their arguments.   
  
Perhaps, come to that, it might just be the subject they were talking about. Draco had grown used to defending his choices, to himself if no one else, in the seven years since he had rejected his family’s plans for him and become an Auror. But his relationship with Harry was new, and Harry had seen the way that he glared at Macgeorge, at his reflection in the mirror, at Harry himself, as if any of those people might try to take it away.  
  
Mind ticking quietly over the arguments they’d had and the intimacies they’d shared without once relinquishing his need to know why Draco hadn’t spoken to him about this before, Harry let himself be led.  
  
*  
  
Draco knew he was going to have a difficult time of it with Harry just from the way that Harry stood and spoke. He was angry, yes, but he hadn’t flown into a jealous rage over Macgeorge the way Draco had thought he would at first. He looked Draco in the eye and asked questions that made Draco feel as if someone was pushing a needle into his bone.  
  
And he didn’t intend to let Draco’s visit to Hale go. The moment they were inside Harry’s front door, Harry turned around, back to the wall and arms folded, and asked, “So, what did you think of dear Lauren?”  
  
Draco tensed, but stepped closer to Harry and touched the back of his neck. “That she didn’t deserve you, and you were right to leave her,” he said simply.  
  
“Yes, well, she’s cold,” Harry said, and fixed his eyes on Draco. “But I still would have liked it if you’d told me you went to see her. That suggests you don’t really trust what I told you about her.”  
  
Draco grimaced and dropped his hand. The bad thing about the way that Harry tended to react to romantic advances—that was, to ignore them or be oblivious most of the time—was that Draco couldn’t distract him that way, either. “I thought there had to be something more that you weren’t telling me, that partners wouldn’t fall out because of what you mentioned,” he said, staring at the wallpaper. “And my parents had mentioned her as if there was some great secret behind it, too.”  
  
“You trusted your parents more than me?”   
  
Draco looked up. Harry’s voice had gone quick and ragged. He broke away from the wall, stared at Draco, shook his head, and then turned and snapped his way into the drawing room. Behind him, the wall where he had stood quivered, and bristly magic unfolded in midair to stroke down the side of Draco’s face.  
  
Draco followed him. “It wasn’t a matter of trusting them,” he said to Harry’s back, as Harry paced in front of the fireplace. “If you remember, I did come and ask you about Hale.”  
  
“And didn’t accept my answers, enough that you had to go and talk to  _her,_ too.” Harry glanced once at Draco, and Draco fell back before what was in his eyes. “I told you the truth, Draco.  _Only_ the truth. Maybe my feelings don’t make sense to you, any more than they did about Lionel, but you should be used to that by now, shouldn’t you?” He shook his head and laughed down in the hollow of his throat. “How much don’t you trust me? What other things would you go behind my back to find out about, maybe if you were more friendly with the Weasleys?  _Shit,_ Draco.” He stopped and pounded one hand against the brick of the fireplace for a moment.  
  
Draco at once stepped forwards and seized Harry’s wrist. Harry was allowed to be angry with Draco, but he wasn’t allowed to injure himself.  
  
Harry twisted savagely, and Draco staggered away and had to save himself from sitting down in a chair with a swift hand on the mantle. He stared at Harry. They had both had the same Auror training, and that meant most motions they both knew wouldn’t work on the other one of them. This must be one of the times that Harry was upset enough to really bring his strength to bear.  
  
“You knew they wanted you to give me up,” Harry said, his eyes bright enough to hurt. “You knew that they wouldn’t have clean motives for telling you about Hale, if they have clean motives for  _anything._ And you still weren’t satisfied with my answer.”  
  
“I wasn’t thinking straight at the time,” Draco said. “We were in the middle of a difficult case, and a difficult argument, and you—Harry, I want to know everything about you. Including what other people say.”  
  
“So you must pay attention to all the rumors that spread through the Ministry, too,” Harry said, with a credible attempt at a drawl. Draco managed to resist feeling too proud. “And the rumors that they print in the  _Prophet._ And you must want to go to my friends and learn all about me that way. Funny, the way you reacted to Ginny, I thought you had other intentions in front of her than learning what she thinks about me.”  
  
“Stop it.” Draco stalked a step closer. “I didn’t mean that. I mean that I want to know about you, and you didn’t tell me.”  
  
“I told you the truth,” Harry said. “Sorry it wasn’t dramatic enough for you.” He paused for a moment, his arms folded and his eyes locked on Draco’s face.   
  
“Why did you trust  _them_?” he burst out with in the next second. “Your parents, the ones that you know betrayed you and wanted you to get rid of me? What was so important about them that you—that you  _had_ to go behind my back?”  
  
“Why did you trust my mother when she firecalled you?” Draco countered, flicking a glance at Harry’s Floo. He would have to go through the wards on it and make sure they were tight. He didn’t really trust a Floo that his parents could access. “You must know that her most likely motive was to make trouble between us, to encourage you to distrust me, or even to make sure that you found me with Macgeorge. She has spies in the Ministry who could have told her that I was with Macgeorge and you were nowhere around.”  
  
“I came to see,” Harry snapped back. “That’s the point. I went to see, to talk to  _you_  about it. I didn’t hold back and wait to see if I could gain some advantage, I didn’t accuse you of lying. If you’d told me that you never went to see Hale and your mother was lying, then I would have accepted that.”  
  
“I won’t lie to you,” Draco said.  
  
“Except for lies of omission,” Harry said. “And lies about your family. I wondered why your mother agreed to help you torture Nancy. Because you went there and told her that you would become their heir again if she did it, didn’t you?”  
  
Draco winced, but couldn’t help a smile at the same time. The old Harry, the one from before Draco had partnered with him, would never have bothered to guess that, and wouldn’t have known what to do with the information even if he did. Draco had taught Harry suspicion and politics, among other things.  
  
“Yes, I did,” he said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you.”  
  
Harry’s head snapped around as though Draco had wedged a fishhook behind his jaw. “What?”  
  
“I said that I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Draco repeated, and cast a small spell that would check for sense-blurring hexes on Harry’s eyes and ears. He wouldn’t have put it past his mother to cast those through the fire; if anyone would know how to use the Floo that way, it was his parents. “Didn’t you hear me?”  
  
“I didn’t expect an apology,” Harry said, after a long moment had passed, filled with enough lightning that Draco thought Harry might throw him out and tell him to come back in the morning.  
  
 _Oh_. Another thing for both of them to learn. Draco hadn’t considered apologizing until this moment, but now he didn’t know why not. Harry wasn’t someone who would try to use the words against him, the way that far too many others would.  
  
“I’m sorry for going to Hale,” he said calmly. “No, I didn’t believe what you told me. But having met her, I can understand. She’s very cold, very restrained, very pure-blooded, in a way that I could never be, and which my parents despaired of me for not being. Your partnership would never have worked out.”  
  
Harry nodded, slowly, wide eyes still fixed on Draco. “I don’t believe that you were cheating on me with Macgeorge,” he said abruptly. “Or that you were necessarily wrong to trick your parents. But not knowing about it—yeah, that gets to me. I don’t deal well with my partners not trusting me.” He grimaced and scrubbed at his hair.  
  
Draco stepped in and gently took Harry’s wrists, bringing his hands down in front of him. He wouldn’t do his hair any favors, playing with it like that. “Because you think Lionel didn’t trust you after you told him you were in love with him,” he murmured. “And because of Hale. And because we haven’t had such good luck on our cases when we didn’t trust each other, when I was under Alto’s influence or you kept plans from me.” His voice sharpened despite himself, since Harry had done that on the Morningstar case.  
  
Harry looked up at him and laughed quietly. “Then we’re both dealing with the same thing, aren’t we? Still trying to live up to the new promises.” He tilted his head back and kissed Draco, passionately, right out of the gate, just as he had begun this argument.  
  
Draco kissed him back, smugly thinking that this was the best “fuck you” he could offer his parents. To continue working with Harry, having Harry trust him, believing in Harry himself, presented an unbroken independence.  
  
Harry stepped back, tugging him in the direction of the bedroom. Draco went, moving like a leopard, heat building inside him. He and Harry had been together several times, but this time…  
  
This time, if only from the sparks in Harry’s eyes, he thought it was going to be more. Mean deeper.  
  
 _No, I was wrong._ This  _is the best “fuck you” of all._


	6. Striving Onwards

Draco’s kiss was hungry enough to sear the inside of Harry’s mouth. Harry kissed back, though, because this was  _his_ idea as much as Draco’s and he wanted to prove that, and Draco followed him into their bedroom with hot, languid eyes and grasping hands.  
  
Harry stepped towards the bed, but shook his head when Draco wanted to follow. “Let me take some  _time_ to get your clothes off, for once,” he whispered. “We’re always flinging them off as though a twisted is right behind us.”  
  
Draco nodded, the motion as slow as Harry could have wished, and then turned in a circle, his arms extended, his Auror robes flowing around him.  
  
In silence, Harry stepped up and started to take them off Draco. His fingers fumbled, but Draco made no sound; he remained still now with his head tilted back and his pulse fluttering in the base of his throat. Harry caressed the skin above the pulse with a faint, fugitive motion of his hand. Draco shifted his hips, but said nothing, and his eyes remained shut.  
  
Harry touched him as he took off the robes, as he took off the thin shirt and trousers that he found underneath them. Scars gleamed here and there on Draco’s skin, and bruises on his knees, from where he had fallen to the floor beside Macgeorge. A thick, blue-black patch glowed on his shoulder, and Harry kissed it, seeing in his mind’s eye where Draco had fallen beneath the twisted’s assault this morning.  
  
Draco shivered. Harry paused, smiled, then explored the bruise with his tongue again. Draco hissed, and pressed closer.  
  
Harry went a bit faster after that, but not much. Draco’s pants were the last things to go, and by that time, Draco was shivering continuously, his legs locked as though he would fall to the floor otherwise, his stomach muscles taut when Harry touched him. Harry paused and eyed him from top to toe. Draco wasn’t as pale as Harry had sometimes thought he was when seeing only the skin of his face and hands, but he was just as lean, a shimmering greyhound, a predatory cat.  
  
Harry waited until Draco took a hitching breath that would probably come out in words, and then reached down and began to play with Draco’s crotch and arse. Draco drew in his breath completely this time, and held it there. Harry smiled up at him and went on playing, hands roaming and pinching and tweaking. When he slid a finger up into the crack of Draco’s arse, Draco shuddered and spread his legs.  
  
Harry rose, kissed him, and cast the first of the charms he would need.  
  
*  
  
Draco had to admit  _this_ was new. Usually, by the time he got to this point, his partner was naked, too, and they were both flat on the bed, or kneeling on the bed, at least. Draco couldn’t keep from tensing whenever Harry’s robes whisked past him and he remembered that Harry stood there looking at him, fully-clothed.  
  
At least there was the sound of buttons now. Harry would be taking his robes off. Draco turned his head towards him, panting, and didn’t care if it looked desperate. He was getting to that point—  
  
And then Harry’s slick fingers slid up his arse again, and Draco rose on his toes despite himself. Harry said, “Hush,” in a voice tinged with laughter, but it wasn’t the kind of laughter that could make Draco blush. He listened intently to it instead, and wondered if he would find the memory comforting or arousing later.  
  
From the sounds of it, Harry had his robes loose now. Draco easily could have opened his eyes and made sure, but he didn’t want to.  
  
Harry kissed him suddenly, shockingly, his tongue pressing in and down. Draco wrapped his arms around Harry’s chest, locking him in place, and they kissed until Draco felt submerged, and his cheeks had definitely flushed, just like the rest of him. He ground his erection against Harry’s leg to emphasize the point. Harry laughed again, without words this time, and cast a charm that Draco knew from experience would rip the rest of the clothing off him.  
  
As Draco drifted in the middle of the underwater sensation, he felt Harry step behind him. He started to relax his legs, thinking Harry would shove him forwards and let him fall over the bed.  
  
Instead, Harry began to surge and push into him with his fingers while standing upright behind Draco. Draco gasped in surprise and caught himself with his hands on the edge of the bed, nearly slipping off the slick sheets that he’d persuaded Harry to put there.  
  
“Not what you expected, is it?” Harry whispered into his ear, his fingers still working steadily. Only when he listened did Draco catch the ragged edge to Harry’s breath and become sure that this was affecting Harry as much as it was him.  
  
“No,” Draco whispered back. The words came out of the portion of his chest that didn’t feel tight and constricted, consumed. He sagged back against Harry, because if he was going to fuck Draco he should bear Draco’s weight, and Harry chuckled and caught him, only swaying in place a little.  
  
Then Harry pushed inside him. Draco waited for a long moment, not sure if he should shudder or push forwards or push back, not sure how much experience Harry might have with this sort of thing, not sure of anything.  
  
Then Harry said, “ _Oh_ ,” in his own voice of discovery, and Draco decided that it would be  _all right,_ always that, no matter what happened. He stretched an arm back and curved it around Harry’s shoulders, tugging him closer, down, seeking and finding Harry’s mouth after a moment of confused encounter with chin and cheek.  
  
Then he did his best to stand upright as Harry began to push forwards.  
  
It was punishingly exhilarating.  
  
*  
  
Harry had dreamed of this a lot, if with Lionel at first. But for the last few months, all his dreams had been of Draco, and he had been sure that he’d thought of every possible combination of warmth and wonder and pleasure that he’d feel with him.  
  
Dreams burned to ashes in the face of the reality. Harry had meant to hold back at first, to hesitate and let Draco set the pace instead of doing it. But his hips had a mind of their own, and set a pace almost brutal enough to knock Draco over. Harry had to cling to him, and meanwhile, their bodies swayed back and forth, following the speed of their heartbeats.  
  
Draco laughed aloud. Harry knew his laughs, and this wasn’t the sneering, mocking one he used when Harry missed the point, or the sneering, mocking one he used when someone else spread rumors about them, or the sneering, mocking one that he used when retelling a scandalous joke. It was loud, private, free.  
  
Harry finally got one arm into position around Draco’s waist, where he thought it might work better than his shoulders to keep Draco from falling over, and fucked him faster.  
  
Draco shoved back in response. Okay, he liked that, Harry thought, and licked sweat off the back of Draco’s neck, then off the tip of his own nose when it started to fall. He was panting so hard that his vision blurred. He leaned in and started adding to the rhythm of his thrusts with his whole body.  
  
Draco laughed again, and kissed him, and then fought to stay upwards as they staggered to the side. Harry caught him and balanced him again, and they were surging along, united in a way that Harry hadn’t ever dreamed of, chasing down the same goal.  
  
It ached. It made Harry want to laugh and punch Draco on the shoulder and collapse on the bed. But he thrust, and thrust, and didn’t collapse, and Draco began to shake in his arms, his teeth shut on the long, vibrant hisses that had begun to escape from him.  
  
Harry hesitated for a moment, calculated the angles in his mind, and then reached down and gave Draco’s crotch a quick stroke, as much pressure as his hand could offer without overbalancing them.  
  
From the way Draco shot forwards, balancing on his toes, and thrust against Harry’s grip, it was more than enough.  
  
Harry felt him start to come, and almost closed his eyes, sighing. But then he leaned forwards and kissed Draco, and that made Draco give a desperate sound and squeeze and thrust at the same time, fighting for balance, fighting for attention, fighting for something that Harry didn’t even know if he could name—  
  
And Harry came.  
  
No choice, no chance to change it. It happened. And Harry reeled and at last dropped both of them on the carpet, because his chances of holding them both up through that were also utterly gone.  
  
Draco groaned beneath him as they landed. Harry stroked his hair and shook. Then he cleared his throat, unable to sound casual, but hoping that he at least sounded concerned about what had happened to Draco. “Are you—all right?”  
  
*  
  
Draco checked the response that he wanted to make. Because it would come out too harsh or too languid, either way, and what he felt was neither, even considering the way that Harry had landed on top of him and driven all the air out of him.  
  
What he felt was  _brilliant._  
  
Draco stretched his arms, up and down and sideways, and opened one eye to watch Harry’s face looming into view. “More than all right,” he said. “But now, I’d like to stand up and go to bed. And then we could see about doing this again sometime before we return to the Ministry.”  
  
Harry smiled. As he rose and held out a hand to Draco, he was still doing it, and Draco’s only thought was that he couldn’t have smiled like this in front of Lionel Vane. Because then Vane would have forgotten all about supposedly being straight and gone with Harry, just to enjoy more of that smile. And then there might never have been a chance for Draco to see it.  
  
He tugged Harry into a long, deep kiss before they took to the bed, and maybe he was able to put the words he missed into that kiss, because Harry gave him another, deeper version of that smile, and then they bounced on the springs, and Draco gave himself over to an evening of pure enjoyment, without worrying about the case.  
  
 _Harry and I should do this more often._  
  
*  
  
Harry sighed and checked another name off the list as he and Draco walked away from the flat in which Sarah Offred lived. They had interviewed every woman in the wizarding world who had a name similar to Sarah Offer, and although Harry still retained the impression that “offer” in the twisted’s message was a verb instead of part of a name, he couldn’t have rested if they hadn’t done it. “Well, now we’re moving on to witches with the first name Sarah in general,” he muttered.  
  
Draco said nothing. Harry looked up at him and found him gazing thoughtfully into space, his hand rubbing his left arm. Harry thought for a minute that he had twisted that arm when Harry landed on top of him yesterday, but recognized the position of his hand after a minute, and swallowed, focusing.  
  
“Does your Dark Mark tell you anything?” he whispered.  
  
Draco shook his head. “Not that. But it sometimes helps me to think.” He faced Harry. “Moxon and Lugar had nothing special about them, particularly. And then the word  _unregarded_ appeared again and again in the message that Macgeorge took from Moxon’s skin. I think that might be part of what the twisted looks for.”  
  
“Unregarded people?” Harry asked. “Ordinary ones?”  
  
Draco asked. “And then he might think in his insane way that he’s doing them a favor. He publishes the truth of their lives on their skin and makes people read it and pay attention to them. Not to mention the attention they get through the newspaper articles about these crimes.”  
  
Harry stared at him. Then he said, “In that case, how are we going to find him, if he simply chooses people that he thinks aren’t famous?”  
  
Draco smiled with half his mouth. “I don’t know. It  _does_ run rather counter to the way that we expected him to work, doesn’t it? But I have an answer—if I’m right—to why he didn’t use his flaw on us when he met us.”  
  
“He knows who we are,” Harry said. “We’re too famous.”  
  
Draco nodded. “Always assuming that I’m right and not simply going off a coincidence of the victims and the wording, then that’s probably it. He couldn’t gain anything from telling the stories of our lives on our skins. Everyone already knows that, or too many people, anyway. Nothing is unique for his Dark little gift to exploit.”  
  
Harry winced as he thought about that. A man they still didn’t know—or it might be a woman, but what they had so far made him think it was a man—who would strike everywhere and nowhere, at victims that he knew but no one else had reason to pay much attention to, in ways that they didn’t know how to counter because they didn’t get the chance to see them in action instead of see their results.  
  
There was no way to stop him except by catching him at the scene of a crime, perhaps. Did that mean that Harry had to sit back and  _hope_ for another vision of a murder, so that they had a greater chance of catching him?  
  
“There’s another way,” he said, and felt Draco tug on his arm. They had come to a stop in the middle of a busy street in Hogsmeade, and Harry shook his head and followed Draco to the shelter of a large house with dangling eaves. No one seemed to be home, or at least no one opened their doors and peered out suspiciously at them.  
  
“What other way?” Draco leaned towards him, his face flushed, and Harry tried not to remember the way it had been flushed with passion just a few hours ago. “What aren’t you telling me?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “You’re paranoid, Draco. I just had the idea. I wouldn’t have hidden it from you.”  
  
Draco tensed against him, then relaxed, and Harry remembered that he wasn’t the only one with some reason not to trust his partner. He gave Draco a quick kiss to reassure him, and said, “We could place all women named Sarah under surveillance. For someone with my past, and my name, and your favors in the Ministry? They would do it.”  
  
Draco tensed, then broke away from Harry and shook his head. “I traded in most of the favors that I had left to let us take that holiday,” he murmured. “I don’t have enough to call in something like this.”  
  
Harry nodded. “But I might. If I give the candid interviews that Skeeter still thinks I owe her.”  
  
Draco sneered. “I know that she  _thinks_ she has power, but she can’t pull all the strings in the Aurors to get us the wizards that kind of surveillance would take.”  
  
“Then maybe we can do something else,” Harry responded instantly, his mind leaping to another plan. “Give Skeeter the interview, and ask her to do a special article on witches named Sarah at the same time, to raise general awareness in the public that that’s the victim the twisted is looking for. If those women seem famous enough to him, it’s possible that he won’t go after them.”  
  
“That assumes my idea is correct in the first place,” Draco murmured, but his eyes were alive with arctic light, and he had stopped slumping against the building. In fact, he was looking at Harry with distinct interest.  
  
Harry smiled at him. “Exactly. But we have to take some risks, try some ideas that aren’t confirmed yet. We already took a risk with what you asked Macgeorge to do.” He wouldn’t mention the word “necromancy” in public, even if the chances that someone would overhear them were small. “Let’s take this one. I don’t mind giving Skeeter the interview. It won’t make me any more enemies in the Ministry than I already have.”  
  
“I think you underestimate how many people are willing to be your enemy,” Draco murmured, but spread his hands and bowed his head when Harry stared at him. “However, you’re right that it’s a better plan than any I have right now, and we don’t have another reliable way to locate Sarah before the twisted kills her.”  
  
Harry nodded, his mind already moving ahead. “Skeeter’s going to want details of the case,” he murmured. “And names.”  
  
“We can give her the names of the victims,” Draco said. “Those are already circulating through the population, with the other Aurors who investigated Lugar’s case first and the interviews we did with Moxon’s family members and Weasley.” Harry started for a moment, then remembered that he meant Ginny. “And we can come up with a name for the twisted if you want. I leave that to you.” He bowed and gestured towards Harry, his hand coming out in a graceful flourish. “Come up with something worthy of my cleverness, that’s all I ask.”  
  
Harry found himself grinning, despite the ridiculousness of what Draco said. “Sometimes I think that you say things like that only to watch me laugh,” he murmured.  
  
Draco smiled. “Not the worst ambition I’ve had.”  
  
*  
  
Draco leaned quietly against the wall as he watched Harry handle Skeeter. Harry was more skilled at it than Draco would have thought, although of course they had consulted about what he would say before he said it.  
  
Of course, Harry was good at many things that he wouldn’t allow anyone to say that he was good at. Draco shook his head. He could speculate on how Harry had learned that attitude, but it wasn’t important at the moment.  
  
What was was watching the heads of the Aurors who peered around the door of the Socrates office and stared. Skeeter had come into the Ministry as grandly as though she was sailing on a flying carpet, of course, her sharp nose lofted to poke holes in any pretense of secrecy. That had attracted attention, and so had the way that Harry had come to meet her in the Atrium, shaking her head as gravely as though they’d never been enemies.  
  
Macgeorge sat at her desk, with her partner Isla Rudie at the one directly behind. Draco had already given her the vial of blood obtained from Lugar’s home, and she was staring at it with a lens. Skeeter had ignored her, probably because she assumed it was a normal Auror procedure rather than a prelude to necromancy, and Rudie had ignored her, probably because Macgeorge had already told her what she was doing with the vial.  
  
“But this wizard can skin his victims alive?” Skeeter asked, leaning towards Harry with fluttering eyelashes. If Draco hadn’t known that Skeeter’s one true love was fame, he would have had to do something about that. “Isn’t that terribly  _dangerous_ for you and Auror Malfoy to face?”  
  
“It’s always dangerous,” Harry said, and turned his head to smile at Draco. Draco straightened up and gave him the smile they’d planned on, a smile that warmed Harry’s face and body, from the way he sat up in response. “But that doesn’t make it any less our job. We want to catch and imprison the dangerous wizards so that the ones who aren’t dangerous don’t suffer.”  
  
Skeeter crooned and wrote. Draco was sure that the words would appear in a different form in her final article, but as long as she wrote something that resembled it, that would be fine. And he was sure that she had coveted this interview for too long to alienate Harry by deliberately distorting the facts.  
  
When she looked up again, her face had taken on that terribly grave expression that apparently fooled some of her readers. “Do you  _know_ who the next victim will be, Auror Potter?” she asked.  
  
Harry lowered his head and sighed. “The only clue we have is the name Sarah,” he said. “We’ve interviewed a few witches named Sarah, but we had no idea that Smoke and Mirrors would strike at the next victims before he did.” Smoke and Mirrors was the name he had decided on for the twisted, given the sooty mask of magic that seemed to protect the twisted when they met in battle. It wasn’t, Draco had decided, the  _worst_ one he could have chosen. “We want witches named Sarah to be careful in the next few days, and not trust anyone they don’t know. Can you issue that warning?”  
  
Skeeter’s chest inflated to dangerous proportions. “Of course I can,” she said. “Shall I include that part in my article on you, or write a separate article?”  
  
Harry leaned forwards and widened his eyes. “Could you make two different articles, and try to get both of them on the front page? That means we could have two warnings, twice over, since I know many people will read anything you write.”  
  
Draco choked, but Skeeter had missed the neat insult in those words. She nodded, her head visibly swollen. “Of course I can,” she repeated. “Two articles, then.” She scribbled again, and began to ask Harry more questions.  
  
Draco relaxed, and let his gaze drift elsewhere. Macgeorge was examining the vial of blood with a different lens now, one made of green crystal. Draco didn’t know what she saw through it, but then, he didn’t know much about necromancy.  
  
And Rudie had abandoned her paperwork to gaze at Macgeorge with folded hands and a wrinkled brow.  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes and began to drift in that direction. Was it possible that she  _didn’t_ know about her partner’s experiments with her flaw? Dangerous, perhaps even suicidal. He knew the instant Harry had one of his visions; Harry knew when he was sensing Dark magic. Of course, it might help that their flaws manifested more visibly and less voluntarily than the way that Macgeorge talked to the dead.  
  
Macgeorge laid down the lens and stood up with the vial of blood, walking towards the door. Skeeter, absorbed in talking to Harry, didn’t notice. Draco was glad of that, at least. The less attention drawn to their necromancer Auror, the happier he would be.  
  
Rudie watched her go, then snapped her head around and glared at Draco. Draco looked back without flinching, but he did want to blink when Rudie stood up and stalked towards him. She was the youngest Auror in the Socrates Corps, and a Muggleborn partnered with Macgeorge, a pure-blood who could intimidate some of Draco’s peers into shutting up. It said much about her concern for her partner that she would come to speak with Draco, whom she usually avoided.  
  
“Do you know what’s wrong with her?” Rudie demanded. Draco flicked a glance at Skeeter, and Rudie rolled her eyes but lowered her voice. “I know that you were watching her, but you didn’t look puzzled about what she was doing with that blood.”  
  
“I know what she’s doing,” Draco said quietly. “Helping us in the investigation on the case. Just the way Harry is with this interview.”  
  
Rudie straightened up, and her face went grave. “As long as you don’t consume her in the work,” she said, and started to turn away.  
  
That was far enough from what Draco had thought she would say that he moved in front of her. “Explain what you mean.”  
  
Rudie half-smiled. “Now who’s attracting attention?” she murmured, because Skeeter had turned around in her chair at Draco’s sudden movement. Harry said something about his “personal life” then, and distracted Skeeter. “I mean,” Rudie continued, “that you both tend to consume yourselves in your work, you and Potter. Staying late, blaming yourselves when a victim dies, always killing or catching your target. I would prefer that you not draw Nicolette into your cases when we have ones of our own to work, and burn up her time and skill in what  _you_ should handle.”  
  
Draco nodded. “I think I can promise that we won’t.”  
  
“You  _think_ ,” Rudie repeated, and walked towards her desk again.  
  
Draco held back his snort. It seemed that, even when they courted attention to what they were doing, as with the Skeeter interview, others would still want to know more than he was comfortable telling.


	7. Blue Eyes

“It’s been seven days without a murder. That’s something, at least.”  
  
Harry’s shoulders twitched. He hunched further over his cup of coffee and hoped that Draco would find something else to talk about. Or, better, read the newspaper. Harry wasn’t in the mood to talk this morning.  
  
“Unless you had a vision of a murder and didn’t tell me, of course,” Draco added casually. Harry looked up to find him buttering a piece of bread, unfairly smoothly when his eyes were fixed on Harry all the while. “I would be  _dreadfully_ upset if that happened and you didn’t tell me, you understand.” He folded the bread and cut it into triangles, his smile faint and bright and not funny. “Dreadfully.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “You know I can’t hide them from you.” The visions gave him the sensations of the victim as they died, and it was hard to keep Draco from watching as Harry was impaled, or fell from a height, or succumbed to the poison or the magic that the twisted had introduced into the victim’s body.  
  
“Then tell me what’s wrong.” Draco swallowed a triangle of bread and leered at Harry in a way that made Harry smile in spite of himself. “Now that we’re partners in every sense of the word, your mood affects my  _sex_ life. You don’t get to go off alone and be a brooding hero anymore.”  
  
Harry took his hand across the table and held it there a minute, watching as Draco switched to eating his bread with his free hand. Yes, there was really no one like Draco, and while at times that made Harry want to yell more than anything else, at the moment he was deeply, quietly grateful for it.  
  
“I can’t help thinking that the relaxation means something,” he admitted. “That our twisted has changed his mind, or is waiting for the vigilance to relax, or that he’ll choose a different target. Or that he might have murdered someone else and we’ll never know just because no one has happened to find the body.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “Aside from your gift,” he said, dabbing at butter on the corner of his teeth, “and the warning it would probably provide us, I find that hard to believe. Twisted don’t change their minds for normal reasons. They’re insane.”  
  
“Not all of them,” Harry muttered. “Not us.”  
  
Draco’s hand tightened on his for a minute. “What have I told you about that?” he asked, mildly enough, but his eyes flashed a warning at Harry, and he looked as if he would have rather preferred to snarl and spit than be gentle. “We haven’t driven ourselves mad studying the Dark Arts. We haven’t killed anyone innocent. The minute those lines start blurring for you, please tell me. I’ll need time to Stun you properly and get you in to see the Healers.”  
  
“As long as they’re Mind-Healers,” Harry said, giving him a wan smile. “Banned from St. Mungo’s, remember? Another of my many badges of distinction.”  
  
Draco paused. Then he said, “Of course. It would be Mind-Healers because they’re the ones who deal with afflictions of the brain. If some of our twisted had gone to Mind-Healers when they first began experiencing their delusions, before they decided that they were arbiters of truth or justice, then we wouldn’t be as busy.”  
  
“What are you planning?”   
  
Draco turned his neck to the side like a swan and fluttered his eyelashes. “I? Me? Nonsense. Nothing. I would tell you.”  
  
Harry narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know that you would,” he muttered. “Not everything. If you had a plan to get me accepted by St. Mungo’s again, for example, that you didn’t think would hurt me when I found out you were keeping secrets, that would please me because you planned it as a surprise—”  
  
Draco broke in with a laugh that sounded almost pained. “And that’s another downside to having a partner in all things,” he murmured, leaning forwards to breathe along Harry’s face and stir the small hairs on his chin. “You know me  _far_ too well. How am I going to keep your birthday presents secret from you?”  
  
“Please don’t try,” Harry said. “You don’t have to get me anything.”  
  
“Because you distrust my taste?” And Draco was silent and bristling again, a milk-white, frozen falcon, his head tilted backwards and his face as still as though he hadn’t just laughed at Harry, which was unnerving when he was so close.   
  
Harry dredged up a sigh from the bottom of his belly. “ _No_. Idiot. I mean that you get me something every day already. Another smile, another witty saying, another reason to appreciate you. You don’t have to get me a birthday gift and keep it secret just because that’s what everyone else does.”  
  
Draco paused, and then said, “You escape my censure on the grounds of being romantic enough to melt my teeth.  _This_ time. Another time I might give you a proper scolding.”  
  
And he tightened his grasp on Harry’s hand, and went back to eating one-handed.  
  
*  
  
Draco grabbed his left arm the instant they came through the door into the Socrates office. His Dark Mark burned as it had when he ran into the twisted outside the door of the Three Broomsticks, as though someone had poured a whole pot of boiling water over it. Harry immediately moved in front of him, turning his head from right to left, his hand on his wand as though he expected to curse someone.  
  
But the only one in the room was Macgeorge, head bowed as she sorted through the materials in front of her. The vial of blood, Draco saw, and strips of skin, and the green lens she had been looking at the blood through yesterday. Draco relaxed and opened his mouth to ask her what kind of necromancy she had used, that the whole office stank of it.  
  
Then Macgeorge raised her head.  
  
And her hazel eyes were blue.  
  
Harry leaped.   
  
Draco reached out and caught his arm, dragging him back. He thought Harry’s instinct to attack and his instinct to pull him back were both done without many words, without  _enough_ words, maybe, given the way that Harry was almost constantly snarling under his breath. But he had done the right thing, he thought, given the way the blue-eyed twisted guided Macgeorge around the desk and pulled her up like a puppet in front of them.  
  
“You should think about what you are doing,” whispered the blue-eyed twisted, popping Macgeorge’s jaw up and down as if it was on a particularly loose string. “What you hope to accomplish, by pursuing your particular targets. Your kin.”  
  
Harry trembled like a wild Abraxan under an unfamiliar hand, so it was up to Draco to speak. “You knew from the beginning what we were,” he said. “Aurors that hunt twisted. I’m surprised that you’ve appeared to us so often, and not to the others.” Warren and Jenkins had been with the Socrates Corps for far longer than Draco and Harry, and as far as he knew, this was the first time the blue-eyed enemy had reached out to either member of Macgeorge and Rudie’s pair.  
  
“You were more troublesome than the others,” the blue-eyed one said. “But I consider myself merciful.” It drew out the word that Draco knew Macgeorge would, and he kept his hand firmly in place on Harry’s arm. Harry was the sort who would attack simply because an acquaintance was being held under the blue-eyed twisted’s thrall. “I am giving you one more chance. You can transfer from the Socrates Corps. Ask your superiors about it. I will touch the right minds, give you permission. You can still be ordinary Aurors again.”  
  
“No,” snarled Harry.  
  
Draco entertained a wistful thought about the world in which Harry had gone along with it and they could have lives free of threats like this, but had to dismiss the idea. There was no such world. “No,” he echoed.  
  
“Then to the end,” the blue-eyed one said, and made Macgeorge’s body bow to them. “To the end of the chase, and the end of the hunt, and the end of my mercy.”  
  
Abruptly, the blue light blinked out of existence, and Macgeorge had her hazel eyes back again. She staggered against her desk and caught herself with both hands braced behind her, gagging as if she would throw up. Her eyes were far too wide. “What was that?” she whispered. “What was  _that_?”  
  
Draco raised the sound-dampening wards; Macgeorge’s voice had reached the level that might attract attention. “That was the blue-eyed twisted,” he replied. “Someone who can possess other people and speak through them.”  
  
“The sensation in my mind is  _foul_.” Macgeorge lifted her hands in front of her and examined them as though she thought there might be a coating of slime on them.  
  
“It is.” Harry stepped towards her and touched her shoulder. Draco watched closely, but Macgeorge didn’t show any sign of flinging herself on Harry’s shoulder and weeping hysterically, which meant she could keep her arms and her eyes. “That’s what happens to those who belong to him. Do you remember anything of what you just said?”  
  
Macgeorge shook her head. “There’s—a blank in my memory. I saw you walk in, and then I saw you there, and that’s it. Is that normal?”  
  
Harry nodded. “But you’re a trained Socrates Auror, and that might mean you can tell us more about what it feels like than someone else. Can you close your eyes and analyze the feeling? Tell us anything unusual?”  
  
Draco shifted his weight. He wanted to say that they needed no more descriptions of the experience than the foulness, and he also wanted to compliment Harry for thinking of such a tactic. He decided that he should hold his silence for this once, because that was more important—perhaps—than getting Harry away from Macgeorge.  
  
 _One can sometimes get over a crush on someone like Harry. Sometimes._  
  
Macgeorge closed her eyes and stood there with a wrinkled brow and bowed head, one hand reaching out in front of her as if to close on an invisible gate. Then she opened her eyes again. “The sensation is already fading,” she said quietly. “As if he took something else out of my head with him when he went.”  
  
“You don’t remember anything about him?” Draco asked. He was sure that he would, if the blue-eyed twisted tried to possess him. He remembered what it had felt like to suffer from Alto’s possession, although that had been a far more confusing, lengthy, and disorienting sensation than it seemed this was.  
  
Macgeorge looked at him, and her eyes had a cold blue flicker all their own. “No,” she said, and turned to look at Harry. “You think that he might have possessed me because he knows that I’m helping you on this case?’  
  
“He might,” Harry said, patting her arm as he thought. Draco moved up and took his hand, so that it wouldn’t wander anywhere it shouldn’t wander, and Harry let him do it, although he was still frowning. “We don’t really know what he knows and doesn’t know, or where he gets his information. What do you think about studying the blood at a distance from us for a few days? That might convince him that you’ve made helping us a lower priority, and make you a less tempting target.”  
  
Macgeorge nodded. Draco curled his lip. He found that kind of concern condescending when Harry showed it to him. He was a fully-trained Auror, every bit as much as Harry was, and with as much experience in the Socrates Corps as Harry had, even if he hadn’t been  _an_ Auror as long; he’d entered training in the year that Harry finished it. Macgeorge, however, wasn’t Harry’s partner, so it might be different for her.  
  
 _Another reason that she will never be a match for him._  
  
“I will do that,” Macgeorge said, and gathered up the vial and the lens and something else from her desk—Draco thought it the mummified hand paperweight, because after a moment of searching he didn’t see it—and whirled through the door of the office, gone before Draco could ask her what she had found in the blood so far.  
  
“There were other things we could have suggested,” Draco murmured, moving up behind Harry. “Things that might have told us more about the blue-eyed twisted.”  
  
“We know as much as we need to know about him for this case,” Harry said firmly, and stepped towards his desk.  
  
He froze. Draco moved up beside him at once, offering his body without comment as a wall for Harry to brace against. It looked as if he were in the grip of one of his visions, and Draco had seen him froth, had seen him fall over, had seen him almost die in sharing the death. He would have traded flaws with Harry if he could.  
  
“No,” Harry said after a moment, opening his eyes and shaking his head. “I thought—but it’s gone. I saw—someone—taking a stone from a case, an opal from a glass case like one in a museum.” Draco tilted his head in silent commendation, since those were the next questions he would have asked. “But I didn’t see anything more.”  
  
Draco frowned. He wondered if the blue-eyed twisted had discovered a way to interfere in Harry’s visions. For them to vanish like that and not go through with a murder was strange enough to be worth commenting on. “Do you feel that same foulness in your mind that Macgeorge talked about?”  
  
“No.” Harry stretched out a hand and groped in front of him, though, and Draco silently stepped into the gap, putting his shoulder there so Harry could get hold of it. “But perhaps he’s come up with a way to interfere that doesn’t leave that trace.”  
  
“Let’s not speculate on that until we have some solid proof,” Draco said, resolving not to tell Harry about the idea he’d just entertained. “In the meantime, I think there might be something else we can do to track down Smoke and Mirrors.”  
  
Harry at once turned to smile at him. He was happiest when he was acting, Draco thought, charging straight ahead or fighting or coming up with a plan. It was one reason that Draco couldn’t imagine him ever leaving the Aurors. “What? If we could trick him into leaving a message, we might at least know who he plans to make his next victims.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “He seems dogged enough that I don’t think he’ll abandon Sarah, whichever one of them he intended to kill, unless he’s forced.”  
  
Harry sighed. “All right. But what’s your idea, then?”  
  
Draco silently took a vial from his pocket, after glancing over his shoulder to make sure that Macgeorge was safely out of the room. Harry stared at the vial and shook his head back and forth.  
  
“Draco…”  
  
“It’s only a piece of the skin that she pulled off Moxon’s corpse,” Draco said. “Not the whole thing. I did nothing to interfere in her reading of the necromantic message. But I’ve been reading up on the techniques, the things people can do to contact the dead even if they don’t have the flaw that Macgeorge has shown. Burning this should bring Moxon’s spirit before us for a few minutes, and we can ask him questions.”  
  
Harry folded his hands in front of him as though he had to stop his intestines from leaking out of his stomach. “Necromancy is always dangerous.”  
  
“So is everything we do,” Draco said, and banged the vial down in the middle of the desk, though he’d judged well and it wasn’t with enough force to crack the glass. Harry stared at it and said nothing. “I still have some of Moxon’s blood, too, out of that amount I collected to give to Macgeorge. If we burn it at the same time as the skin, then his spirit will be practically forced to appear to us.”  
  
“What if Macgeorge is trying to contact him at the same time?” Harry looked back and forth between the vial and Draco’s hands, as if he thought Draco would produce the blood right then. Draco did have it on him, but he would keep it hidden until they performed the ritual. Either by itself might be excused, but someone seeing skin and blood together would know what they intended to do if they were at all familiar with necromancy. “Then we would tug his spirit back and forth between us. I don’t want to do that.”  
  
“You don’t want to do that, but it’s an excuse,” Draco said. “You know that we aren’t likely to end up speaking to his spirit at the exact same time as Macgeorge is.” His hands rested for a moment on Harry’s, and he smiled into his face. He knew that stood a good chance of weakening Harry, no matter how determined he had started out as. “You’re worried about what could happen to us as a result of this, but we have to solve this case.”  
  
“I’m worried about what could happen to  _you_.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “I’ve told you that you’re allowed to worry about your life as well, that no one’s going to chastise you for that, and in fact I’ll go after you if you don’t care enough about it.”  
  
Harry only shook his head, gaze steady on Draco. “I  _meant_ that you’re the one who’s enthusiastic about necromancy, and the one who was badly burned by the Dark magic that the twisted used. What if the same thing happens with this?”  
  
Draco touched his Mark, the source of that burning, before he could stop himself, and saw Harry nod as if he had proved a point. Draco restrained the urge to roll his eyes and only said, “I don’t think the same thing will, Harry, but if it does, then I’m prepared to accept it. I’m the one who came up with the plan. I wouldn’t have done that if I thought it didn’t give us a good chance to find Smoke and Mirrors.”  
  
Harry still checked Draco’s eyes and his face as though looking for some signs of outward corruption, but at last he nodded and said, “If you think that we can do this and get some benefit out of it, I’ll agree.”  
  
“Thank you, oh wise leader.” Draco swept him a bow, ignoring the way Harry pushed him. “Where should we do this?”  
  
Harry hesitated. Then he said, “Your house would probably be the best. Your wards are stronger than mine, and if we do it in the Ministry, then someone is  _going_ to catch us.”  
  
Draco chose not to remind him that Macgeorge had performed her own necromancy in the Ministry without getting caught. He had won a victory, one he didn’t want to destroy by scratching at the surface of Harry’s complacency. He kissed Harry and said, “Then my house it is.”  
  
*  
  
Harry sat on the couch that Draco had told him to sit on and stared at the brazier that Draco had placed in the middle of the drawing room. His sweat was still chilling on his skin, and he found it hard to breathe. But he did his best to keep his face still and his hands immobile in his lap, because Draco wouldn’t like it if he reacted more than that.  
  
He didn’t like this plan.  
  
He knew, better than anybody, that some of the Dark Arts the Ministry was prejudiced against were simply harmless, and others were spells that he had used himself, out of necessity or because they were the best spell available at the time. But necromancy was in a different category for him.  
  
 _And you know why. The Gina Hendricks case._  
  
Harry pushed his hand flat over his face and groaned. He hated that case, and the memory of it that he had had to live through more than once.   
  
It was the case where Lionel had died. The case that was named after the first victim, and not the criminal, unlike most of the other cases that the Aurors had on file, because no one had ever found out what the  _creature_ that did the killing had been. Whether it was human, and if it was, what its name had been then.  
  
Harry had seen necromancy used then. And he knew that it had been involved in the case that had seen Draco assigned to the Socrates Corps, too, the case that Draco still couldn’t talk about. Harry thought it wasn’t a  _wonderful_ idea to start practicing it now.  
  
But he had no other leads, no other clues, no other ideas. And seeing the blue-eyed twisted take Macgeorge this morning had rattled him. Perhaps, if their enemy found her important enough to focus on, then it  _was_ important to look into her methods and see if they could use them.  
  
“I have the skin and the blood.”  
  
Harry looked up. Draco had come back into the room, and he carried the vials with him, as well as a sort of flat-bottomed basket made of what looked like coal. Harry blinked and sat up.  
  
“What do I have to do?” he asked.  
  
Draco handed him the basket. His hand was hot where it touched Harry’s, and his body trembled a little. Harry held his hand for a moment, stroking the fingers apart, trying to show him without speaking how strange this all was. Draco only tilted his head to the side and pulled his fingers away.  
  
“Hold this while I prepare the fire,” he said, and knelt next to the brazier with the vials. To Harry’s relief, he didn’t open them yet, but he took out his wand and began to chant, long and falling words that seemed to continue on their way down a slippery slope to some obscure destination, never actually arriving.  
  
Harry listened, but if there were Latin words he knew in that chant, Draco pronounced them too differently for him to make them out. He stared at the basket and ran his fingers over the rough sides. He shuddered when he did. It  _felt_ ugly, the same way that it looked. Harry would have liked to put it down and go have a wash.  
  
But he had agreed to come this far, and he wouldn’t abandon Draco to face necromancy on his own, so he sat and waited.  
  
Draco finally finished the spell and sat back, watching the flame in the brazier for a few seconds. It was small, to Harry’s eyes, and had a bluish tinge that stirred memories he clenched his teeth over, but it must have satisfied Draco, because he turned towards Harry and snapped his fingers impatiently.  
  
Harry extended the basket. Draco took it and set it in the center of the fire. Harry squinted and made out the way it seemed to hang from an invisible spit, which sometimes became less invisible and showed as a flicker of steel or silver.   
  
Into the basket Draco poured the blood, and then cast another spell that made the brazier flare bright and followed it with the skin. Harry wrinkled his nose as the smell made its way through Draco’s house. Although he had suggested that they come here for the wards, he found himself grateful that the stink wasn’t going to pervade his own rooms.   
  
“Now,” Draco said, and then began another spell that Harry couldn’t comprehend, but which he recognized. He had heard it cast over Lionel’s body.  
  
Harry closed his eyes and counted his breaths, making sure that his lungs  _continued_ to work, laboring until he thought that he could lift a house with them. Then he opened his eyes and looked again.  
  
The skin had caught fire, but still burned, a thread in a bigger corona of fire. It turned blacker and blacker, though, crisping, and Harry licked his lips and held his breath, this time, so that he wouldn’t vomit.  
  
“I summon Michael Moxon,” Draco said, his voice clear and strong despite the reeking smoke that had begun to fill the house.  
  
There was a surge and a sharp movement in front of them, and Harry saw the skin grow a small head, human and not snake as would have fit the shape. The jaws moved, the eyes blinked, the skin stretched. Harry clenched his fingers beneath him in the carpet, ready to move back if he could. He reckoned that was how Moxon had looked, from the photographs he and Draco had seen in the last few days.  
  
It still disgusted him.  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask the first question, and Moxon’s head moaned and stretched out of shape. The eyes that fixed on them in the next second were blue, bright as supernovas, bright as the color the fire had originally turned.  
  
“Stupid of you,” said the head conversationally.  
  
And Harry felt the magic sweeping into his mind.


	8. In Mind

Draco saw the way that Harry started and jerked, and guessed what was happening. He kicked out, upsetting the brazier and the flame, which all the books on necromancy he had read had said would sever the connection between the world of flesh and the world of the spirit. If the blue-eyed twisted had no host—  
  
The brazier fell, the coals winked out, Moxon’s face disappeared. But Harry was still struggling and gagging on the floor, his nails ripping strands out of the carpet as he fought the blue-eyed twisted in his mind.  
  
 _He already made the jump,_ Draco thought as he stood.  _Harry is his host now, not Moxon, and that means I could have left the brazier alone._  
  
Part of his mind thought about and regretted the lost chances even as he struck out, fast and hard, at the side of Harry’s head. Knock him unconscious, and the blue-eyed twisted might lose his hold and thus his opportunity. Draco was perfectly willing to nurse Harry back to health if the blow hurt him.  
  
*  
  
Harry felt the blow, but it was a minor stunning, dizzying point in the midst of all that pain and chaos.  
  
He fell because of it, he knew, but then, the drawing room had been going in and out of focus since the blue-eyed twisted flowed into his mind.  
  
He had never seen the process of possession like this. He wondered for a second if they had just missed the people the blue-eyed twisted controlled fighting him, or if there was something in Harry’s flaw or mind or resistance to the Imperius Curse that had kept him at bay for at least a few minutes.  
  
But such thoughts distracted him from the battle and chanced the blue-eyed twisted getting control of him. Harry coiled his body around and rolled, steady and back and forth, bringing all his will and all his power up, centered around the one goal of remaining free in his thoughts and getting rid of his enemy.  
  
 _Not as painful as when Voldemort was here,_ he thought, and wielded his memories of that possession, and the way that Voldemort had fled. He had probably left in part because Harry had been a Horcrux, but then, so what? There could be traces of the Horcrux left in him still. And he could resist the Imperius Curse, and twice he had survived the Killing Curse, and he had walked with the shades of the dead.  
  
All the special things about him that other people so desperately wanted to believe were true, Harry would admit were true if they helped him drive the blue-eyed twisted back.  
  
Slimy, dripping hands gripped and tore at Harry’s mind, but slid off on a coating of their own slime. Harry coiled and kicked back.  _I know what you are,_ he shouted into the silent face.  _I know what you want of me. You are not going to get it._  
  
The blue-eyed twisted snarled once, and then seemed to get a firm grip, because he laughed. Harry heard the laughter with the same senses that seemed to function in dreams and sometimes woke him with snatches of music that he knew he’d composed himself. _Am I not?_ he asked as his foulness began to pour into Harry’s mind like unleashed oil.  _Just because you think that you’re special, Socrates Auror—_  
  
Harry coiled his legs again, and coiled his power.  _Special._ The word seemed to ring through his mind and echo back, down the years, to the first thing he had done—besides surviving the Killing Curse—that had ever made an adult tell him he was special. There were the basilisk and Quirrell before that, but too few people knew about them.  
  
 _Expecto Patronum!_  he bellowed in the depths of his mind, grinding his jaws shut at the same time so that no words of the spell could escape.  
  
The blue-eyed twisted gasped for breath in a voice Harry almost knew, and then a silver stag rose boiling from the depths of his mind, pale electric flames twisting around him. He caught the sense of foulness on his antlers and tossed it aside. At the same time, his hooves drummed on the chute that was pouring the oil in and slammed it shut.  
  
Harry tore and clung at the same time, trying to understand why the voice was familiar. But it vanished, it soared away, and he opened his eyes, panting, horribly bruised and battered, his head ringing.  
  
But free.  
  
*  
  
Draco stepped back, wand in hand, when Harry opened his eyes. He could see no trace of blue darkening the brilliant green, though, and Harry’s eyes were so fervent a color that he was sure he would have. Draco dropped the wand down to his side, but didn’t look away from Harry’s face as he watched him touch the side of his head and wince.  
  
“I did that,” Draco said. “I thought it would give you a greater chance to fight him off. Sorry,” he added, the taste of the word still foreign in his mouth. It had been the word that nothing could make him say to his parents, and now he had said it twice to Harry within a fortnight.  
  
“It’s all right,” Harry said, shaking his head. “But I don’t think that worked. It only meant I had something to concentrate on, but he didn’t. I don’t think he feels the pain in the bodies he possesses the same way that the owners of those bodies do.”  
  
Draco paused. That was a new idea, and he wondered if it might let them comprehend the blue-eyed twisted’s flaw, which they had not managed to do so far. “Are you sure about that? It’s not the way that possession usually works.”  
  
“I wouldn’t know.” Harry had already aimed his wand at the side of his head, a movement that made Draco step closer no matter how competent he thought Harry was at self-healing, and murmured a quiet  _Episkey._ When the lump shrank and began to turn pale, Draco relaxed a bit. “I was only ever possessed by Voldemort.”  
  
Draco let his eyebrows creep up. “That’s not something mentioned in the official biographies of the Boy-Who-Lived.”  
  
Harry laughed, and then stopped and clutched his head again. “If you know anyone who bought one of those biographies, tell them to return them. Most of them get the year of my birth wrong, and that’s just for starters.”  
  
Draco nodded. “When did your possession happen?”  
  
“At the end of my fifth year, when I was fighting off Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries.” Harry kept his head bowed, so that they wouldn’t need to look each other in the eye while he spoke about fighting a group that had included Draco’s father, and Draco kept silent so he wouldn’t need to speak about it. “Voldemort had been dueling Dumbledore, but then he possessed me, because he thought he could force Dumbledore to kill me. Then he let me go. I didn’t fight him off the same way I did the blue-eyed twisted, though.”  
  
Draco nodded. “What did you use just now?”  
  
Harry seemed satisfied that nothing else in his head was broken, and looked up with a grin. “Would you believe a Patronus?”  
  
Draco blinked twice, then said, “That only makes sense. They are supposed to protect you from an immaterial evil that you can’t touch, and which you can feel more than see, at least until it’s close. And it also makes sense that it would manifest in the middle of a mental battle rather than a physical one, since that was your greatest need at the moment.”  
  
“I thought something like that, although not in those direct words.” Harry shook his head. “He shut off the channel that connected me to the blue-eyed twisted, the way he was getting through. At least, it seemed like it.”  
  
Draco nodded. “Perhaps someone else would have managed to escape, too, if they had the same skills with the Patronus as you.”  
  
“Or if they’d thought to use it.” Harry sat up and laid his fingers gently in the middle of Draco’s forehead. His face was so serious that Draco let him linger there, staring into his eyes. “If he ever comes after you, I want you to remember that and use it. It was more than foul, it was like becoming mad.”  
  
Draco gave him a small, hard smile. “I think we both have our experiences of me being mad, under Alto’s control.”  
  
“This was worse,” Harry said. “Because I could feel the things that he would delight in making me do. Alto had no idea what she was doing and would have killed herself long before we found her if she had, I think.” Draco let that go for the moment; he disagreed, although it was true Alto was the one twisted they had ever met who had no idea of her powers and what they could do. “But yes, that’s what I felt. And when he was fading away, I did think that his voice was familiar. But I’ve met and interviewed and killed so many people down the years, it could have been any one of them.”  
  
“Probably not someone you killed,” Draco had to point out.   
  
Harry laughed as Draco had wanted him to, and then looked at the spilled brazier, shaking his head. “Well, we know that necromancy didn’t work. What do you think we should do next?”  
  
“Rest,” Draco said, and let his fingers briefly linger over the spot where he had hit Harry in the side of his head.   
  
Harry protested the way that Draco had known he would, but because Draco had known it was coming, it was also easier to combat. In the end, Draco got him into bed and lay there, watching him breathe.   
  
The way he could so easily have stopped doing. Draco didn’t know for sure what would happen to the blue-eyed twisted if the body he was possessing died while he was still in it, but they had killed some of his possessed victims before, and it seemed he had managed to jump out of them while they were writhing in pain. And perhaps he could convince the possessed to commit suicide, too.  
  
Harry could have died in front of Draco’s eyes.  
  
Draco caressed Harry’s hair, and thought. They needed another way to stop the blue-eyed twisted, since necromancy hadn’t worked. He knew books that would give them the solutions, books that dealt with situations of possession and told how to possess someone with the gift. Perhaps Dumbledore could even have used them to defeat the Dark Lord, or Harry could have, since he was the one with the connection to the Dark Lord through his scar.  
  
But those books were in Malfoy Manor.  
  
And Draco knew better than to think a simple lie, a simple promise, would get him through the wards this time.  
  
*  
  
Harry shrugged when they came into the office the next morning and he found that Rudie was looking at the side of his head. A bruise must still have been visible. “A small tussle,” he said, and sat down, pretending to become absorbed in his work.  
  
Rudie let that last for about five minutes before she cleared her throat. Draco had gone out to use the loo, Harry saw when he looked up, and Macgeorge hadn’t been in yet this morning, if the state of her desk was any indication. Rudie stood with her hands clasped in front of her, so professor-like that Harry smiled. She was a little young for that.  
  
“What?” he asked.  
  
“Nicolette hasn’t been herself for the past few days,” Rudie said briefly. “First absorbed in study of that blood, and then yesterday saying she’d been involved in a training session that hurt her head. Except I’ve sparred with Nicolette, and the only time she’s looked like that, there have been visible wounds.” She gestured to the side of Harry’s head and raised her eyebrows.  
  
Harry sighed, wishing Draco was here to help him handle the interrogation. At least he couldn’t have gone far. “No, I didn’t fight with her. Draco was the one who struck me.”  
  
Rudie blinked. “I had thought you were too—close for that. Why?”  
  
“Connected with the case,” Draco said smoothly, stepping back into the office and lounging against the wall in a way that Harry knew well could put him between Rudie and Harry with one lunge. “Afraid we can’t tell you unless the Ministry grants us permission to share all the details.”  
  
Rudie smiled back at him, and she had acquired an iron edge to her expressions when Harry wasn’t looking. “You did something to Nicolette,” she said. “Convinced her of something, told her something, that closed her off from me. I want to know what.”  
  
Draco turned on Rudie the single most earnest expression Harry had ever seen him wear, even when he was lying to a professor in Hogwarts. Harry made a mental note to keep that expression in mind, and what harm Draco could do with it.  
  
“Have you considered,” Draco said softly, “that not all partner teams are that close? That this could have to do with personal things that she doesn’t want you to know about, just in case you distrust her? And that our stumbling onto those things by accident could have embarrassed her and made her determined to avoid us?”  
  
Rudie’s expression flickered, reminding Harry, again, that she was younger than most of the other Socrates Aurors, only a few years out of training. “She still would have told me. She knows that I worry.”  
  
“I don’t think she does,” Draco said, so smoothly that Harry wouldn’t have heard the lie in his voice if he hadn’t been listening for it. “She thinks of you as her little sister. And she thinks of you as Muggleborn.”  
  
“If you’re suggesting that she’s too influenced by blood prejudice to work with me,” Rudie began, turning towards the drawer in her desk where Harry knew she kept their pile of successful cases.  
  
“Not at all,” Draco said, back to earnest again. “I simply mean that sometimes pure-bloods get this odd  _protectiveness_ of Muggleborns. She thinks that it’s her duty to face up to the dangers of magic that she’s heard of from childhood and you know nothing about. And she’ll go charging into danger alone, in that case.”  
  
Harry kept quiet. He had seen that for himself, actually, when he was working with pure-bloods (other than Lauren Hale, who had simply been the wrong partner for him all around). But it would never have occurred to him to use it in a deception, and present it with that earnest a face. Another reason why Draco was a good liar.  
  
Once, he would have feared that that ability meant Draco would be able to turn on him more easily. But such fears had died now. Draco did what he had to do to protect them as a team and make their cases work. If that included lying and the Dark Arts, well, the Ministry had made that necessary for them.  
  
“She’s never said anything like that to me,” Rudie said, but she had frowned and reached up to touch her hair in a way that Harry knew meant she was almost convinced.  
  
“Of course she wouldn’t  _say_ that, when she knows that you would reject it,” Draco said, with the round, tolerant tones of a person Harry thought Hermione might be proud of. “But it is true that the bias is there, influencing her, even if unconsciously. Some of the things I’ve heard her say about you prove that.”  
  
Rudie remained still a short time longer. Then she said, “I’ll speak with her. You ought to know, however, that I’m watching.” She tossed Draco a thin smile and walked out of the office, presumably to hunt down Macgeorge.  
  
Harry shook his head at Draco. “You  _do_ think of things quickly,” he said, a neutral comment in case Rudie was still in earshot.  
  
“Everyone could do what I do,” Draco said, with a small shrug. “They don’t think quickly enough.”  
  
Harry blinked, so unused to Draco deprecating himself that he didn’t know how to answer. Draco moved on before he could, in any case, and leaned his hands on the desk. Harry eyed them, and then Draco’s face. Draco rarely looked like that unless something serious was in the wind.  
  
“I have an idea of how we could progress in this case,” Draco said. “But it would involve something you don’t like.”  
  
“I don’t always like all your ideas, but I don’t think I’ve hated the majority of them,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “What is the idea?”  
  
“That we get some books from Malfoy Manor that reveal how to combat the possession of people like the blue-eyed twisted.”  
  
Harry flinched before he could stop himself. Draco smiled at him, not having to say a word, and waited with his fingers stroking the desk.  
  
Harry looked at him, waited until the temptation to blurt out something unfortunate had passed him by, and then said, “Couldn’t you find the same books somewhere else?”  
  
“Not without alerting whoever owned the library that I was looking for books on the Dark Arts,” Draco said, and his eyes had an intensity that Harry wondered at. Perhaps it had been more common years ago, before his parents had disowned and exiled him. “That’s the problem with most of the libraries I know about, including the Ministry’s. And I have no friends anymore who would let me look at theirs quietly.”  
  
“But what does it matter if the Ministry knows about the possession?” Harry asked. “It’s only the other thing that’s intrinsically Dark.” He wouldn’t name necromancy without the wards up. “We could go and get all the books we need, and then we wouldn’t need to make you into a scapegoat for your parents.”  
  
“Is that what you think going to them is doing to me?” Draco cocked his head. “No. And I don’t want the Ministry to know what we’re doing.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to argue, and shut it again. He could argue with the impulse on rational grounds, but on emotional ones, he understood what Draco was saying. The Ministry had cited them for breaking rules, let Harry get banned from St. Mungo’s, been perfectly happy to let them break up as partners when Draco had been under Alto’s control and Harry had asked to be assigned a different partner, and ignored the toll the twisted took on them by immediately giving them new cases. They’d had to trade favors for their holidays. The Ministry wanted them to handle the twisted, but otherwise, cared little about what happened to the Socrates Corps.  
  
It wasn’t a promotion to be placed here, Harry thought, not exactly. It was what they did with Aurors who had seen magic so Dark that they no longer obeyed the Ministry’s rules or thought some lesser Dark Arts were so important to keep banned, and the Ministry shoved them away in discomfort to a place where they could still be of some use.  
  
“All right,” Harry said. “But tell me that you have a plan to accomplish this which doesn’t involve you crawling on your hands and knees to your parents. The only one you should get on your knees for is me.”  
  
*  
  
Draco knew he flushed from pleasure, and gave Harry a look that would have ended with them both on the floor if they didn’t have better self-control. Or perhaps if Draco didn’t have better self-control. From the way Harry sat up and stared at him, lips parted, he would have been happy to ignore their better knowledge and have some getting on their knees this moment.  
  
Draco licked his lips, and refrained. “Yes, I do,” he said. “It will need your help, and your magic. But I think that I can rely on you to conduct yourself in such a way that my parents won’t have anything to report to the Ministry. They tend to avoid the Ministry in any case, since they think the Aurors treated them so poorly after the war.”  
  
There was a time—not that far gone, from the glint in Harry’s eye—when Harry would have had a lot to say about how the Ministry had treated his parents. Now, he just inclined his head and murmured, “All right. But what do you think I can do to these wards that you can’t?”  
  
“The wards have been changed to keep me out,” Draco said. His throat thickened for a moment as he remembered standing on his parents’ doorstep—recently, with Morningstar, and several times before that—and feeling the wards crackle around him. “I don’t think my parents would have a reason to tune them specifically to you, since we’ve only been partners for a few months and it’s much easier for them to turn wards around against someone they once favored.”  
  
Harry blinked. Draco clarified, “The wards favored me, because of the blood connection, and would always have let me through. Now they’ve been turned over to aim specifically at my blood and body. It’s much easier to do that than to build in the same kind of antipathy towards someone not connected to my family with blood.”  
  
Harry nodded. “All right. But I want to hear this famous plan. And no crawling.”  
  
Draco smiled. “How would you feel about using the most powerful and Darkest magic you can against my parents’ wards, and then taunting them from a broom?”


	9. Taunting the Malfoys

Harry opened his eyes, and blinked. He thought he’d heard the sound of a Floo connection opening, but it was the middle of the night. And Draco slept beside him, his mouth slightly open and his arm flung across Harry’s chest. That left Harry to wonder if Narcissa had found a way past the wards on his Floo connection again. He hadn’t investigated that as closely as he should.  
  
But when he rolled out of bed and padded into the middle of the drawing room, it was Ginny’s face in the flames.  
  
“Ginny,” Harry said cautiously, sinking down in front of her. Once he would have demanded to know immediately if Ron and Hermione were okay, because there was no other reason he could imagine that she would call him this late. But since her strange behavior earlier in the case, he felt two opposed kinds of tension singing in him. “What’s the matter? Is everything all right?”  
  
Ginny closed her eyes and shook her head. “I think you might have been right about Michael,” she whispered. “He contacted me tonight, and there was something—off about him. I asked him if he was all right, and he said he was. But he wanted me to meet him in Paris.”  
  
“And you decided not to go?” Harry asked quietly.  
  
Ginny nodded, then opened her eyes again to look at him. “He wouldn’t give me an address. He just kept telling me to go to the Louvre and he would find me there. I didn’t want to, and he cursed at me and shut the Floo.”  
  
“Did you try to call back?” Harry asked. He realized that he was falling automatically into the pattern of talk that an Auror would use to question a witness, and grimaced a little. But Ginny had made herself a witness by contacting him with this.  
  
Ginny nodded. “The call wouldn’t go through. I kept getting this recorded message in French—something about no one being there, but I didn’t understand any more than that.”  
  
Harry frowned and tapped his fingers on his knee. “How did he seem off?”  
  
“He spoke more quickly than usual.” Ginny ripped her fingers through her hair, a gesture Harry recognized from the beginnings of arguments, and the ends of them. “He laughed in this  _weird_ way. Like he was talking into the bottom of a tin can. And his eyes. They were a blue so bright that it looked as though he was casting a spell on them.”  
  
“It’s good you contacted me,” Harry said calmly, even as he wondered why the blue-eyed twisted would bother luring Ginny away when he could have possessed her. Then again, if he was twisted, who would understand the way his mind worked? “We’ve been dealing with people who have eyes like that, and it means they’re possessed.”  
  
Ginny sat up. “Then maybe I  _should_ have gone, to make sure that poor Michael wasn’t in any danger,” she began.  
  
Harry shook his head. “If I’m right about that, there’s nothing you could have done to save Michael. He’s completely under the control of the possessor while it happens, and he won’t remember anything when he lets him go. And by now, the possessor might have moved on, when he realizes that he didn’t succeed in trapping you.” He stood up and turned towards the bedroom. “I’ll tell Draco. He might have—”  
  
“Harry.”  
  
Harry paused. He knew that sound in Ginny’s voice. Only heard once, but never forgotten, when she had used it to beg him to keep their breakup a secret from her parents. In the end, it had been Ginny who told them, unable to bear their innocent questions about when Harry and Ginny were getting married any longer.  
  
He knew that he would do almost anything for her when she sounded like that. And he feared what she would ask him to do now.  
  
“What?” he asked, turning around and trying to swallow through the sick sensations in the back of his throat.  
  
Ginny leaned forwards until it looked like the ends of her hair would dangle out of the fire, her eyes bright and earnest, green with the light of the flames. “Please don’t tell him,” she said. “It’s—I don’t trust him. And he sounded as though he hated Michael when you talked to me the first time. I don’t want him to know.”  
  
Harry moved a step back. “I can’t do anything about that,” he said, feeling as though Ginny had slapped him. “This could connect to our case—it  _definitely_ connects to the people we investigate who keep getting possessed. I have to tell Draco.”  
  
“I would prefer that you didn’t,” Ginny whispered.  
  
Harry wavered for a minute. It was a long time since Ginny had asked him anything like this. Would it cost so much to oblige her?  
  
Yes, it would. She might not know about the cost, but it didn’t mean that that cost didn’t exist. Harry would lose Draco’s trust, again, if he found out about Harry keeping secrets from him, and they would lose what could be one of their best leads on the blue-eyed twisted, and maybe even Smoke and Mirrors.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Harry said, as gently as he could. “I don’t have any choice.”  
  
Ginny drew herself up and looked at him. Her eyes were dry, but her face was set in a way that Harry also knew well. He flinched as if that could protect him from the memories, while her eyes drilled into him as if memorizing him for one last photograph before she destroyed all the other pictures she’d ever taken of him.  
  
“Thank you for telling me that,” she said, voice devoid of emotion, and then Harry’s Floo connection flared and shut down.  
  
Harry bowed his head. He sat there for a long time before he turned around and went to wake up Draco.  
  
*  
  
Draco concealed a yawn behind his hand as Harry knocked on Weasley’s door. He considered this mission a waste of time. Weasley had already told them everything relevant, at least to her, and it seemed enough information for Draco to conclude that the blue-eyed twisted had indeed possessed Corner. What Harry wanted Weasley to do further, confess or apologize, he didn’t know.  
  
No one answered Harry’s frantic knocking, and when he tried to peer into the keyhole, a surge of wards knocked him back. He swore and turned to stare at Draco. “What do we do now?”  
  
“Investigate her garden,” Draco said, and strolled around to the side, to the stone walls. He had noticed a weakness in the wards the last time they were here, caused by a climbing plant. That happened all the time to people who weren’t Potions masters or Herbologists and didn’t understand that plants were living things experienced at dealing with harsh growing conditions. They could find their way through stone, asphalt, wood, water; they could deal with magic.  
  
Harry followed him, frowning. “Why?”  
  
Draco first located the tendril of ivy and wound it with his Enlargement Charm, then stepped back and watched as the ivy expanded and the rent in the wards expanded with it. “Because I saw flowers there last time that no one but a Potions master has any business having, and I don’t think she is one.”  
  
“What flowers?”  
  
Again Draco chose to wait to answer, until the ivy and the wards shivered together and the magic collapsed from the outside like a spiderweb unraveling. Draco grabbed the sleek space of cleared stone and hauled himself up, then turned to extend a hand to Harry. “Coming?”  
  
Harry frowned at him, but after casting a charm at the door that resulted in another flurry of knocks and no answer, he climbed up after Draco. He blinked a little when he was sitting next to Draco. “I hadn’t realized that Ginny had so many flowers.”  
  
“I saw them when we visited the other day,” Draco said, avoiding a comment about what trained investigators were supposed to notice and what they weren’t, and launched himself from the wall to land gently on the soft earth. There was no reason that Harry should have seen those particular flowers as a problem, given that Draco had the Potions master training and he didn’t. This was one reason that the Ministry assigned Aurors to work together in teams.  
  
 _And I can’t believe that I just thought of something about the Ministry as praiseworthy._  
  
Harry followed him, and then paused and turned his head. Draco paused in return. Though he knew more than Harry about certain specific subjects, Harry’s senses were sometimes keener than his.  
  
“No, it’s just someone else walking past the house,” Harry murmured, but he did cast Disillusionment Charms on them.  
  
Draco nodded his thanks, and moved over to one of the giant purple-red flowers, already preparing the Cutting and Drying Charms. Some of the Potions masters had wards up to protect these flowers, the times that Draco had seen them in their gardens, and other times the flowers had been allowed to grow almost wild and so had their own formidable defenses.  
  
But nothing happened this time. The flower swayed back and forth, but didn’t respond with thorns or lashing vines as Draco cut its roots up from the ground, dried and pressed it with a succession of heavy invisible weights, and then caught it in his hand as it fell. The brilliant color faded a little, but not much. Draco could be incredibly handy with preserving ingredients when he had to; since his parents had exiled him, he didn’t always have the money to buy his own healing potions.  
  
“What do Potions masters use them for?” Harry asked behind him, sounding as if he would repeat the question until the world fell in.  
  
Draco sighed and turned to him. “A poison called Snake’s Bane—not because it kills them, but because it poisons people so much more effectively than they do. There’s no known antivenin to counter it.”  
  
Harry paled and shut his eyes for a moment. Then he said, “Could someone have given them to her as a gift and not told her what they were? And surely they have other uses.”  
  
Draco shook his head and tucked the flower away in a clean handkerchief in his pocket. “Not really. They make Snake’s Bane, but in most other potions, they’re too unstable and reactive an ingredient. They would make other potions explode,” he translated, when Harry leaned forwards. “The most current research I saw has some Potions masters hoping to use them in potions that replicate Blasting Curses, but the demand for that is small when the spell is so convenient, and they hadn’t succeeded so far.”  
  
Harry nodded, slowly. “All right. Then do you have any idea how they came here?” He turned his head from side to side, looking at the way the flowers grew in a great cluster near the wall and draped over the stones near Weasley’s window.  
  
“No,” Draco said, and cast a few charms that wreathed the garden with shimmering golden chains of light. None of the chains blinked, which meant the other illegal flowers he’d been looking for weren’t here. “But it would be interesting to look around her garden and house, when we have time, and find out what else she has.”  
  
Harry nodded again. “But not right now,” he said. “You said that we needed to go to the Manor and fool your parents.”  
  
“Yes,” Draco said simply, and left the garden. He regretted the missed chance, because he didn’t know if Harry would be so compliant the next time they visited Weasley.  
  
But it  _was_ more important to get the books on possession out of the Manor, and they didn’t know yet how or if Weasley and Corner’s little mystery connected to the mystery of Smoke and Mirrors, or the blue-eyed twisted. The garden could wait.  
  
*  
  
Harry touched the shaft of his broom and took a deep breath. He could do this. And he didn’t really think that he needed to have any reservations about taunting Draco’s parents. They had done far worse than that so far, including direct and indirect manipulation to try and wrench him and Draco apart.  
  
 _So why the nervousness?_  
  
In the end, Harry shook his head and rose, hurtling towards the outer gates of Malfoy Manor. Draco had said that he would know when the wards had engaged because he would see a blue flare in the sky ahead of him—  
  
 _There._ Harry pulled up and coughed a little, then cast the  _Sonorus_ Charm on his throat. Draco hadn’t told him what to say, only specified that it needed to be arresting enough to keep his parents’ full attention.   
  
Well. Harry wasn’t sure he could do arresting outside his Auror career, but he could sure as fuck do vulgar.  
  
“Do you know how many times Draco and I have given each other blowjobs?” he casually asked the wards. He could see some shimmers of gold and red running together, collecting in a pool at the base of the wards that sloped towards him. He assumed they were listening wards, meant to extend the owner’s senses and tell them more about who hovered outside their gate.  
  
Silence. But the red and gold shimmers might have grown more threatening.  
  
“ _Lots_ ,” Harry said. While not strictly true, he could supply the missing details from his own fund of fantasy about Draco. “I love going down on him. There’s this scent from his skin—it’s deliciously salty. I always wondered if pure-bloods would taste different from Muggleborns, and now I know.” The Malfoys probably believed all the rumors about him having multiple lovers down the years; he doubted they would know how limited his experience really was. “They  _do_. It’s this sharper taste, as if their blood is coming through the skin.”  
  
He saw a door in the side of the Manor open, but from this distance, and with the wards in the air between them, he couldn’t make out whether the figure standing in it was Lucius or Narcissa. He decided that he didn’t have to care, and half-shut his eyes as he began a detailed fantasy.  
  
“And then there’s the way that he looks at me when he’s ready to feel my mouth on him. This glance from the corner of his eye, as if even now he feels it’s too dirty to mention directly. But he loses all his inhibitions when he lounges on the bed. He leans back and commands me with his eyes like a king, but his hips are begging—”   
  
“Mr. Potter. You will  _cease_ this dreadful and disgusting display.”  
  
That was Lucius, and his voice didn’t have the booming echo of  _Sonorus,_ but was plenty loud enough for Harry to hear. Harry grinned at him and shook his head.  
  
“Why should I, when you’re under such delusions as to our relationship that you think you can split us apart with a simple trick?” he asked. “It’s amusing, you know, the way that you still expect Draco to leap to do your bidding when you cut off all contact with him for seven years. People change in that time, and have new hot buttons. Like the way that my hair curls at the back of my neck. Draco tells me that he  _loves_ that.”  
  
Lucius took a step down the gravel pathway towards him. Harry looped his broom back a cautious glide, but he couldn’t stop smiling. He’d seen the icy expression on Lucius’s face done better by Okazes.  
  
“It’s all right,” Harry told him consolingly. “I know that I’m not everything you hoped for for your son. I’m not pure-blood, and I’m a man, and I’m not someone that you think of as having a lot of money. But I’m the one who fucks him best and makes him happiest, you know. You’d think that would count for more in your eyes. I reckon it doesn’t.”  
  
Lucius came to a halt with his hands resting delicately on the gates. He’d probably meant to embarrass Harry with the way he moved and touched them, but Harry could make out the white knuckles, and smiled at him.  
  
“You will leave,” Lucius said.  
  
“No, I won’t,” Harry said, and flew in a loop, looking coyly over his shoulder towards Lucius.  
  
Another person came walking down the path, and of course it was Narcissa. If they had anyone else living in the Manor besides portraits and house-elves, it was news to Harry. She halted beside her husband and gave Harry a chilly nod. “Did you come simply to act childish, or is there a deeper purpose to this visit?” she asked.  
  
“Oh, both of course,” Harry said, and placed a hand over his heart. “I hope you know that love for your son sometimes make me giddy and stupid.”  
  
Narcissa leaned forwards. That silver necklace Harry had seen her wear when she contacted him in the Floo flared bright. “You could better his life by leaving him,” she whispered. “It is not love when you degrade his heritage and name his private behavior in the bedroom aloud for all to see.”  
  
“ _Hear_ ,” Harry corrected. “It would be hard for someone else to see words.” He met Narcissa’s gaze and shrugged a little. “I know that you’re quite a stickler for semantics. Anyone who could think of someone who saved the world as not worthy enough for their bloodline would be. I thought I’d help.”  
  
Narcissa turned away and spoke to Lucius, not lowering her voice. Harry couldn’t decide if she wanted him to hear or simply wanted to pretend he didn’t exist, which required speaking the way she normally would. “Dismiss him, Lucius.”  
  
Lucius nodded, and lifted his wand. Harry saw the wards quiver as the end of his wand touched them, spreading out to resemble ripples in a pond. The last traces of blue faded; it was all gold and red.  
  
“Gryffindor colors!” Harry chirped. “For me?” He reached forwards as if he would touch them with his empty hand, and wasn’t surprised when they coalesced into a fist of light and punched towards him.  
  
Even if he hadn’t recognized the modified Transfiguration that Lucius used on the wards, though, he would have been able to avoid the fist. It moved too slowly. He looped again, and he was out of its reach. He shook his head at Lucius. “You have to do better than that, to kill the Chosen One. It’s something you should have learned from your Lord.”  
  
The fist of light came at him faster this time, and less coordinated. Harry flung himself backwards, and felt it brush over his bristles. He came back up and bowed to Lucius. “More respectable, but still clumsy. Do you think that you might have Muggle blood yourself, somewhere back down the line? I know that you share a common ancestor with some of the Weasleys.”  
  
And this time it was the fastest of all, but Harry had spent some of yesterday flying in preparation. He wasn’t a Quidditch player anymore, but his natural talent was flying, after all, not just playing the game. He arched up and dropped down, and then did it again, just to be special, as the fist passed back beneath him.  
  
“Is that the best you have?” he asked Lucius, and let his eyes flicker sideways to Narcissa. “Maybe you could manage a more creative defense. I know Draco could. Are you  _sure_ that— ”  
  
He didn’t even get to finish the implication, which didn’t matter when he was reasonably sure he had angered both the Malfoys to the point that they wouldn’t be paying attention to any other part of the wards. This time, multiple fists came from all directions, closing in on him like a pack of wolves.  
  
Harry closed his eyes and dropped.  
  
It was a faster fall than any he had ever managed with a Wronski Feint. He could feel the ground pressing closer and closer to him, the hunger of the grass and earth for his flesh. Harry almost smiled when he had that thought. Here, closer to Malfoy Manor than he had been in years, that impression had the greater likelihood of being true.  
  
He pulled out of it hard enough and late enough that he bruised his knee on a stone. He flew back up and fled from the fists that were pursuing him, then looped back towards the house and cast a Blasting Curse that he knew the wards would catch.  
  
They did, flaring green to do it, and Narcissa, who had been in the path of the curse more by accident than by design, gave Lucius a little nod again.  
  
This time, Harry recognized the motion of Lucius’s wand, and knew he was in trouble. The air around him tightened and froze. Lucius was trying to imprison him in a moment of solidified time, where he could keep Harry as long as he liked and deal with him at his leisure, and for Harry it would always be the same second—until he was released.  
  
But that was Dark Arts, and Harry had done his own study in the years since he had become an Auror. Well, in the years since he had lost Ron to the joke shop, really. Without a trustworthy partner at his side except for the first few months he had worked with Lionel, he had to guard his own back more often.  
  
Harry lifted his own wand and snapped out the counter, and the ward broke and fled before him. Lucius watched him with a motionless face, and Narcissa reached out and rested a hand on his arm.  
  
Lucius promptly stepped back, inclining his head. Harry wondered why he had never seen him do that before, but then, he had rarely seen Lucius and Narcissa together as husband and wife—at the Quidditch World Cup and after the Battle of Hogwarts was about it. He pulled up and hovered as Narcissa leaned forwards and aimed her words through the gates.  
  
“You came here for another purpose than making us waste our magic on you. What is it?”  
  
Harry hovered closer and lowered his voice. “You really want to know? You think that you can bear the knowledge?”  
  
“We bore with the obscenities that you shouted about our son,” said Narcissa, and looked as if she wanted to sneeze from the vulgarity. “Yes, I do.”  
  
Harry sighed. He and Draco hadn’t thought it would come to this, but as long as he was still being a good distraction, then he knew what he had to do.  
  
“I want a promise of safe conduct for as long as I’m in the Manor,” he said. “I don’t think this should be said aloud.”  
  
Both the Malfoys stared at him again, but now, Harry could see some of the lines around their mouths becoming gentler. They were impressed that he knew about the safe-conduct promise, he thought, which had used to be a tradition pure-blood wizards used when communicating with one another about the terms of duels.  
  
“You have it,” Narcissa said. “I promise not to harm you in any way while you are in the Manor, on my blood.”  
  
“I make the same promise,” Lucius said, “on mine.”  
  
Harry held his breath as the wards lowered and he flew cautiously in.  _Draco, fetch those books out soon._  


	10. Promises Made on Blood

Draco shut his eyes when Harry began talking. He hadn’t told Harry what to say, and he wondered for a moment if his blush would carve permanent flames into his cheeks.  
  
On the other hand, he hadn’t told Harry  _not_ to say that, either. And his lips twitched when he thought of his parents’ reaction. He would have to insist on viewing Harry’s Pensieve memories after they had returned home.  
  
 _Which we won’t if you don’t concentrate more on opening the wards._  
  
Draco shook his head and turned back to the wards in front of him. They still spat when his hands came near them, but he had cast several Dark spells that struck at their foundations and unraveled them, and the flaring was less than it had been. Now they sounded like angry kittens instead of angry flames.  
  
Draco studied them with patient eyes that had the benefit of Auror training now as well as Malfoy training, and smiled when he noticed the weaknesses threaded through them. Cracks from his spells, cracks from age, cracks from the way that his parents had forced them to react against his presence seven years ago. It was centuries since a Malfoy had become so completely outcast as Draco, and that meant his parents didn’t know all the intricacies of how to change the wards so as to eliminate his presence.  
  
He bent closer and blew out, adding magic to his breath by means of a nonverbal spell that he’d learned from an unlucky duelist. The wards flickered and wavered, and their resemblance to flames increased. Candle flames this time, though, and they were thinning further as he watched them.  
  
Draco held up his wand and waved it back and forth, twice. He heard the wards straining to follow it, and knew that this was the dangerous moment. If his parents looked around now, they couldn’t help but notice the strange behavior of the wards, and they would come down on him like hunting hounds.  
  
But red and gold light flaring up from the front of the Manor said that his father was trying to hit Harry with the spells that became fists, and Harry was laughing and taunting them with his flying as much as with his words. Draco didn’t think he needed to worry about being noticed for some time to come.  
  
He blew again, and chanted the same weakening spell, and the wards shuddered and vanished from a circle as long and tall as his body, leaving the wall undefended. Still a rock wall, still challenging to climb, but Draco wasn’t a Socrates Auror for nothing. He laid his wand against the stone and whispered yet another incantation.  
  
The stone dissolved into grey flecks like snow. Draco walked through them as they crumbled to the ground, laid a glamour over the hole to cover the damage in case someone happened to look through the windows while he was inside, and then turned towards a side door with his lungs shivering in anticipation.  
  
He had been in the Manor less than a month before, but this was his  _true_ homecoming.  
  
*  
  
“You will take wine, Mr. Potter.”  
  
Harry wondered if Lucius knew how to speak except in orders. Perhaps he didn’t speak so to Narcissa, considering the way she sat beside him like a leopardess in front of a kill and now and then flicked Lucius a glance. He felt those glances like reins, Harry thought; he changed direction without his expression wavering.  
  
“I don’t want any, thanks,” Harry said.  
  
Narcissa turned her glance on Harry now, but Harry had spent all his childhood with people trying to put bridles of one sort or another on him, and his Ministry career hadn’t been free of it, either. He wasn’t a mount for anyone’s riding.  
  
 _Except Draco’s._  
  
He smiled and flushed at the thought, and perhaps that was why Narcissa blinked before she said, “We have sworn you safe conduct in the Manor. You insult us by refusing.”  
  
“I don’t like wine,” Harry said, truthfully enough. He would drink it for Draco’s sake, or to blend in on a case, and otherwise only used it when he was tormenting himself with memories of Lionel. “I prefer water. I wouldn’t mind pumpkin juice if you have it, either.”  
  
Narcissa and Lucius slid glances towards each other that Harry could translate easily, although he might have expected they would be in High Pure-Blood.  _This is the man that our son abandoned us for?_  
  
Harry smiled, and wondered both how long it would take Draco to break into the Manor’s library and how they could see it as Draco abandoning them for Harry when they had driven Draco away years before he and Harry were partnered.  
  
Then again, speakers of High Pure-Blood always seemed able to find ways to ensure that nothing was their fault. Harry was glad that Draco had learned to speak a different dialect.  
  
“Water, then,” Narcissa said—pumpkin juice was apparently right out—and gestured towards the house-elf that Harry had seen hovering in the corner of the doorway. It immediately ducked out of sight and returned with a brimming glass. Harry took it and held it.   
  
That occupied one hand, which was a little unfortunate, but he could bring wandless magic to his defense if he really had to. And he had to trust to the safe-conduct to at least give him warning.  
  
“What do you want to leave Draco?” Lucius spoke briskly, but Harry had learned enough to keep his eyes on Narcissa, and he saw her grimace. Her husband’s crassness seemed to disgust her. As she leaned back, that silver necklace around her throat glowed again, and Harry made a mental note to find out what magical properties it had, if he could. He didn’t think the metal itself was important as much as the shape of the coils and the way it hugged her skin like a snake.  
  
“The bribe, you mean?” Harry sipped from the water, or appeared to. It was a useful trick he had learned at Ministry functions, back when the Ministry still wanted him there. It made him appear drunk and babbling when he was still sober and setting traps for suspects in his speech. “I don’t want any bribe. Draco himself is enough.”  
  
“You realize that Draco would have more chances for life, for wealth, if he was our son once again,” Narcissa said. Her words were as plain and calm as snowfall.  
  
“I didn’t think he’d ever stopped being that,” Harry replied. “Unless you’re talking about that experimental charm that someone came up which ensures pure-blood families aren’t really related anymore to their exiled children.”  
  
Narcissa’s fingers twitched once. Harry expected her to ask about the spell, which didn’t exist, and which he could then have some fun weaving her in lies about.  
  
Instead, she leaned forwards and said, “Draco was reared and trained as our heir. He does not do well in the outside world with those instincts and precepts guiding his behaviors. Not as well as he would do in the place he was raised for.”  
  
“You make him sound like a dog it’s hard to housebreak,” Harry said, and grinned a little when he saw the way that they both stared at him. They’d probably never had a dog, and wouldn’t have housebroken it if they had. Instead, house-elves would have magically cleaned up its shit. Harry wasn’t entirely convinced that that didn’t happen with Lucius and Narcissa themselves. “Anyway. I don’t want to leave him, and I think that Draco is a good Auror. Even if he has to fight to fit in, so do I, and I didn’t have the same background that he did.”  
  
Lucius and Narcissa exchanged another pair of flowing glances, and Lucius nodded. Narcissa said, “That is evident.”  
  
“What is evident?” Harry sipped at his water again, swallowed air, and tried to show them his widest eyes and stupidest expression.  
  
“That you had a very different background than Draco did.” Narcissa’s words bounced like sleet now. “Not just Muggle, but abusive.”  
  
And Harry found his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth as dryly as though they had offered him nothing to drink, after all.  
  
*  
  
Draco stepped into the library, and relaxed.  
  
This was one of the magical places of his childhood. Here he had hidden from his parents’ boring lessons and learned new and interesting ones, in the years before he went to Hogwarts. Here he had learned about Dark Arts, and what separated them from ordinary magic (the Ministry ban, usually), and the grand and proud history of his family. No matter how much his parents had forced him to leave behind, they couldn’t take his memories from his mind, and they had probably never known how many private impressions he’d formed as he sat here reading, instead of walking the gardens or exchanging polite and chilly conversation with his friends the way his mother and father had thought he was doing.  
  
He didn’t know everything they would have liked him to know. He knew more.  
  
He moved on through the shelves, his hand up and trailing down the edges of the books. His parents hadn’t bothered to improvise wards in here that would catch him. Draco halted at the end of an aisle and turned his head, eyes shut as he thought about the relative position of the history books, the Dark Arts books, and the books on recovering from mental illness. (His ancestors had had a very small portion of people who would trust themselves to St. Mungo’s; the rest depended on themselves).  
  
Yes, there. Draco strode over to the shelf that glimmered behind a blue shield of wards, sufficient to keep a child out. When he touched them, the wards sniffed out his adult Malfoy blood and vanished. Draco picked up the first book.  
  
 _A Guide to Possession._ He studied the dark cover and the gilded braiding on it carefully, the sketches of the letters, and the rubbed place on the spine where the author’s name had once been before he lifted his wand and created a glamour in the book’s place on the shelf. It would fade once someone had held it for a few seconds, but he only wanted to cover up the evidence of his theft for immediate purposes.  
  
He rather liked the notion that his parents would realize what he had stolen once he and Harry were safely away.  
  
He went down the shelves, sorting out  _Healing Possessed Minds, The Legilimens and the Occlumens, The Hidden Art, Dark Wizards of History,_ and others, and dropping them into the conjured satchel he had taken to carrying. Harry had mentioned the spell his friend Granger used to expand a bag inside, and Draco had figured it out after a few experiments. Each book received study and its replacement glamour in time.  
  
Then he reached the end of the shelf and turned around.  
  
And found that there was an addition to the library, one he hadn’t known about, glimmering on the far wall. Unprotected by wards. A brilliant mirror, the same color as the silver necklace that his mother had lately taken to wearing.  
  
His eyes narrowed, Draco took a step forwards. He could see his own face in the mirror, pale and gold-wreathed, and his eyes still narrowing as if they would reach the condition of slits and then vanish altogether.  
  
Magic shimmered around the thing—not unusual for Malfoy Manor, but with a sharper edge than Draco remembered from the wards. He moved closer and closer, wanting to know what it was, and reached out a hand to touch the frame, which had less magic than the glass and was carved with writhing snakes.  
  
Silent light unfolded from one of the serpents’ mouths and seized his arm, yanking him in and close. Draco stumbled, then recovered his balance and braced his feet. He was not going any nearer to the mirror than he was already.  
  
It drew him, however, shining through and through, and utterly quiet, so that Draco did not think it was a ward that had alerted his parents. He would have to fight it in the same silence. He cast Locking Charms and charms to baffle sound at the door of the library, and then settled into the battle.  
  
*  
  
Harry knew his lips had cracked where he’d stretched them around his narrow smile, but he didn’t know how to heal them without being obvious. He settled for clearing his throat and saying, “Excuse me? You must be mistaken. You know full well that I was raised away from the wizarding world by Muggles, not pure-bloods like yourself.”  
  
Lucius’s eyes glinted in a way that said he would remember that insult, but Narcissa’s never changed. “We know you were,” she said. “We have spoken to your relatives. And they told us about the chores. The lack of food.” She paused, like someone about to lay down the final piece in a game of chess. “The cupboard.”  
  
Harry said nothing. He could feel the pounding in his ears, and wondered for a moment why the Dursleys would even have spoken to the Malfoys, instead of slamming the door in their faces because they were wizards—  
  
 _Money._ Of course. It had been even more important to Vernon than being normal. And he probably got used to wizards during the war, at least a little bit. The Malfoys could have persuaded them to talk.  
  
“Interesting information you have there,” Harry said, and shook his head. “From people who hated me. If you plan on exposing how naughty I was to the population as a whole, I think you should remember that they probably exaggerated.”  
  
“I was not,” Narcissa said, “planning on exposing  _your_ actions.”  
  
Her eyes said it all. Harry wondered if he should be depressed or maddened to realize that he could read her so clearly, but that was a distant, intellectual thought, separate from the emotion trying to crest in him.  
  
He had just barely got people to ignore him except for when he made a spectacular arrest. This would bring back all the bollocks about the “poor Savior” and the “torment he suffered” when he was a child. It would bring back the requests for interviews, from Mind-Healers convinced they had the right treatment, from people who wanted him to know how they had been abused or hurt so they could compare experiences. It would undermine him and preoccupy him.  
  
It would make him a much less sufficient support for Draco and a much less efficient Auror. It was a good threat.  
  
Which meant Harry had to counter it with one as good, although he wouldn’t have the evidence to back it up that Narcissa did.  
  
He let his eyes rest on her necklace for a moment and then said, “I think you heard during the war that I could speak Parseltongue. The only one in England other than Voldemort who could.” Ah, that name was good for a little flinch, or at least a back-and-forth sway. “And since his death, the only one who can.”  
  
“Tell us why that matters.” Narcissa, blunt again, but polished as a cat’s claws, sitting there with her hands folded in her lap.  
  
“That necklace of yours,” Harry said, and smiled at the coils of it, and hissed once, sharply, not a word in Parseltongue but a random noise. At the same time, he chanted a nonverbal incantation in his mind as strongly as he could, trying to force and focus his wandless magic so it would obey him, trying to make the necklace  _move_ —  
  
Narcissa’s hand flew up as the necklace twitched against the skin of her throat, and she stared at him. Harry swept a small bow and came up shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, with so much insincerity that Narcissa seemed as if she would really have liked to slap him. “But you see, I recognize certain truths in you, too. Truths that I would have no reason to hold back on if you exposed mine.”  
  
“You would not do such a thing if you cared about Draco,” Lucius said.  
  
“What makes you think I care about him  _that_ much?” Harry shook his head. “I already told you all the things that we do in the bedroom together. And he’d already be dealing with the backlash from what you revealed about me.”  
  
Narcissa and Lucius turned towards each other, and aside from a few murmured words that Harry couldn’t make out, appeared to communicate entirely through their eyes and the shape of their mouths. Harry curled his lip. Was their appearance really so important to them that they would keep it up in front of an enemy who they’d threatened and who had threatened them back?  
  
Narcissa turned to him with her eyes as large as moons, at last. “We will have to…consider what to do, Mr. Potter. And if you can be trusted to keep your silence for the sake of protecting Draco.”  
  
Harry smiled at her, all edges and shadows and shine, the way that he had learned from Draco and from her. “I hope that you will think carefully and make the right decision, Mrs. Malfoy.” And he sipped at the water, watching her stroke the silver necklace again. It had only been a wild guess that it had anything to do with Parseltongue, but he thought he had convinced her that he could influence it.  
  
Which meant she was willing to wear it and worry about that influence rather than simply remove it, where it could not threaten her anymore.  
  
 _Interesting._  
  
*  
  
Draco tried a simple Blasting Curse first. It was aimed at the center of the mirror, but the wards deflected it aside and into the arms of silver light that were holding onto Draco and drawing them nearer.  
  
One of the ones that clutched him near his left shoulder shattered.  
  
Draco half-bared his teeth. So that was the way it was? He hurled more curses at the mirror, and more and more arms shattered. Draco stepped behind a small table piled with books and braced his hip against it. At this rate, he thought he might soon reach the point where the mirror couldn’t pull him anymore.  
  
Then he realized that the serpents’ mouths on the edges of the mirror were growing more limbs, reaching out as if that would make it easier for him to surrender, and he half-snarled and changed tactics. This was Dark magic, and needed to be fought in the same way, like the twisted that he and Harry had encountered.  
  
Draco crouched so that the arms had to reach for him around the edge of the table, and launched a swift incantation that surrounded him in a glowing aura of purple-black light. Then he waited for the newest silver arms to settle on him, ignoring the way that the mirror continued to pull with the ones that already held him. Those arms were having a hard time reaching him at the angle where he crouched.  
  
The newest silver limbs touched the aura—  
  
And blew apart in a flurry of silver sparks that started a small fire on the floor. Draco smothered that by rolling on top of it—a true fire would cause alarms to go off despite the silencing charms he had cast—and then got out from under the table and began another deep chant, this one a spell he had learned from books in this very room.  
  
The mirror was pulling him nearer in the meantime. Draco ignored that, because he had to or it would drive him mad. Instead, he reached deeper and deeper for that spell, pushing and pouring his strength into it, reminding himself again and again that he had to win against this, and that his parents couldn’t know he was there. They would destroy Harry. They would destroy him. He would never stand a chance of getting his heritage and his money back.  
  
It was impossible to say which of those reasons was the strongest, but reminding himself of them all did the trick, and made it possible for him to resist. When he got close enough to see the blurred outline of his reflection in the mirror, he thrust his hand forwards, his wand shimmering with an aura that echoed the one burning around Draco, and the sparks brushed the edge of the mirror.  
  
There was a shuddering sound both in and outside the room. Draco saw the mirror shimmer, dance, and then fade like a flame.  
  
The reaching silver arms vanished, too. Draco dropped to his knees and shut his eyes, his head twitching to the side and his arms and shoulders falling into place as he relaxed. The spell was one that could make solid objects cease to exist in the same way that dispelled glamours would. He hadn’t known if he could make it work on an artifact as powerful as the mirror; he had never done it before.  
  
Then he opened his eyes and turned his head as he heard screams.  
  
He snatched the satchel, tore open the library’s door, and began to run towards the wall. The screams weren’t in Harry’s voice, which meant he was getting out of here instead of investigating the way he would if they were.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaped to his feet and found himself pressing backwards as the necklace around Narcissa’s throat abruptly shattered in a series of flying silver shards. He avoided the shards more by accident than by design; they seemed to be aimed at the couch he was sitting on, but now he wasn’t there.  
  
Narcissa had both hands up at her throat, tearing, her fingers sliding on the blood and the cut skin. Lucius was kneeling next to her, calling and shaking her desperately, but she could only kneel and scream. Harry wondered if the necklace had cut her jugular. No, surely not, or she would already be dead. It was probably magical trauma instead of physical pain.  
  
Narcissa went silent at last, because Lucius had cast a spell that rendered her unconscious. He sat back with the jagged pieces of the necklace in his hands and looked up at Harry.  
  
Harry recoiled before his gaze.  
  
“I will remember that you did this, that you controlled it, and then this happened,” Lucius whispered. His hands began to close down on the silver pieces, and they bent and warped. “It is only my safe-conduct that holds me back now.  _Go_.”  
  
Harry turned and left the Manor. His own private guess was that the necklace breaking had something to do with Draco breaking into the Manor, but he had no idea, really, and no desire to stay. He would count on Draco’s expertise to mean that he had already left the Manor and needed no help, and no further distractions.  
  
Once he was back on his broom, flying back to the agreed-upon meeting point, then he had time to think about what was wrong with that assumption. But he saw the flash of white-blond hair through the trees, and a waving hand, and he could let go of his own fears when he landed and put his arms around Draco, bowing his head to place his nose in Draco’s hair.  
  
“Harry?” Draco sounded bewildered, although he was stroking Harry’s head without asking all the questions that Harry would have in his place. “Is something wrong?”  
  
Harry looked up and shook his head. “Just realizing that I’m still lucky to have you,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”  
  
“And I have plenty to tell you, as well,” Draco said, and seized his arm for the Side-Along Apparition, so quickly that Harry barely had time to grab his broom before they both vanished like Narcissa’s serenity.


	11. Pieces and Shards

“So you think the necklace broke at the same moment as I broke the mirror?” Draco leaned forwards so that his forehead rested against his hands, which were propped on Harry’s table in front of him. “Well. It makes sense. But I have never seen anything like that mirror before and I took no notice of the necklace when I first saw my mother wearing it, so I don’t know what the connection is.”  
  
Harry had to smile as he handed Draco another cup of tea to replace the one that had gone cold an hour ago. “I’m sometimes amazed that you became an Auror.”  
  
Draco peered at him. “Why?  _You’re_ not about to tell me that I should have stayed a pampered son in my parents’ mansion.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Of course I didn’t mean that. Then I wouldn’t have you, and that would be unacceptable.” He waited until Draco had got over the minor wave of preening that remark produced before he added, “But you can’t stand not knowing things. I wondered why you wanted to be an Auror when your main job then is solving mysteries.”  
  
“That hatred of uncertainty is part of what drives me on,” Draco said simply, and put the cup down after a single sip. “And you’re holding out on me.”  
  
Harry blinked. “What?” He had described the shattering of Narcissa’s necklace to Draco several times, while Draco had only talked about his battle with the dangerous magical mirror once, and Harry had even told Draco about how he had used the imaginary connection to Parseltongue and the nonverbal spell to convince Narcissa he controlled the necklace. He was sure Draco had heard the insulting words Harry had used to win entrance to the Manor, and he didn’t appear to want to talk about those, so… “What didn’t I say?”  
  
“You didn’t say,” Draco said quietly, leaning forwards, “what convinced you that you had to threaten them with Parseltongue in the first place. Especially since they had given you safe-conduct promises on their blood.”  
  
Harry winced.  _Shit_.  
  
He didn’t know how to say it. He thought his blood was racing faster than it had when Narcissa had talked about interviewing the Dursleys. He glanced away, and Draco got up and came around the table.  
  
Harry hunched, but Draco only stroked the back of his head and the nape of his neck, and went on stroking. Harry relaxed as he sat there. Of course it wasn’t the same, however much he wanted to keep silent about the Dursleys. The elder Malfoys were his enemies, and Draco wasn’t.  
  
“Harry,” Draco whispered. “What could they have threatened you with? They didn’t know I was in the Manor, or they would have come to stop me.”  
  
Harry took a deep breath and reached back to catch and squeeze that stroking hand. “They interviewed my Muggle family,” he said, when he knew that his voice wouldn’t shake. “Offered them enough money to talk. It must have been a  _lot_ of money, since they despise wizards so much.”  
  
“My parents would have that much money,” Draco said, his voice light, but not gentle. “What did they learn that scared you so? Where they lived?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “I didn’t even know that, after the war.” Draco’s hand tightened, but he didn’t speak. Harry licked his lips and plunged on. He was going to do this  _right_. “They—learned about how my relatives abused me.”  
  
And he had even got out the word  _abused_ without his voice shaking. Harry was proud of himself.  
  
*  
  
 _Ah_.  
  
Draco shifted nearer. He had suspected something like this, just from casual remarks Harry would make about the way he had grown up, remarks that Draco didn’t think he was aware of. To be fair, Draco wouldn’t have noticed them either, half-a-year ago. It was only after he and Harry had become true partners, watching each other’s backs, that those careless words made him go on point, and wonder.  
  
But he hadn’t wanted to confront him about it. The times that he’d hinted towards it, Harry had backed off again. And Draco wanted the whole story when he did get it, the unconstrained one.  
  
It appeared that he was about to hear it, and because Harry had decided to offer it. Draco wished he could find some way to express how important that was to him, his consciousness of its rarity, but he kept his stance still, and Harry delivered after a moment.  
  
“She knew the most important details,” Harry said. “And she threatened to tell the papers. Which would make people pay attention just when they were mostly ignoring me, and pity me, and mess  _everything_ up. The case, the way the Ministry thinks of me—”  
  
“What abuse, Harry?” Draco rubbed his shoulders, first the right and then the left, never both together, in massive, soothing strokes. “Explain to me about it.”  
  
He watched Harry’s hair bob as he bowed his head, and the sound of his swallow ran long and thick through the room. Then Harry said, “They starved me sometimes, and I had to do a lot of chores. They told me I was a freak for doing magic. They didn’t tell me I was a wizard. They had me sleep in a cupboard until I started getting Hogwarts letters.”  
  
Draco stood there, and thought about that. He heard Harry grunt, and quietly took back his hands, which had curled deeply enough to stab his fingers into Harry’s shoulders.  
  
Then he said, “I had not realized it was that bad.”  
  
“It’s not something I like to think or talk about much.” Harry rubbed the nape of his neck as though it ached for Draco’s hands now that they were gone. “Would you, if you were me?”  
  
Draco shook his head. “Not unless I was giving someone instructions to avenge me.”  
  
“That’s what I don’t want.” Harry kept facing forwards, but Draco could see the side of his face, and the lines that tightened there as if carved in glass. “That’s why your mother could make it into such an effective threat. I don’t  _want_ someone taking revenge for me, or drawing attention to it. No one.” He turned around and faced Draco then, his hands rough in their motions, his brows drawn downwards. “Do you understand me, Draco?”  
  
Draco nodded to him, and thought about the slenderness of Harry’s wrists, and the way that he had never seemed to grow as fast and as tall as the other boys in Hogwarts—though he was more than perfect in height now—and the way that he sometimes started breathing heavily when they were in small rooms. “Perfectly.”  
  
Harry’s mouth tightened. Well, why not? Draco’s reply hadn’t reassured him.  
  
But he let out a light pant a few minutes later, and said, “Well. That’s everything that happened to me in the Manor, everything your parents talked to me about. And now we only have to figure out how it connects to the case of the blue-eyed twisted and Smoke and Mirrors, and do something about it.”  
  
Draco nodded to his description of it, and said, “I think that we have waited long enough. We have the minor mysteries to pursue, but we also have the books.” He touched one of the tomes he had brought out of the Manor. “And there are certain things, such as Weasley’s flowers, that we will simply have to wait to know more about.”  
  
Harry tilted his head to the side in a way that said he didn’t agree on Weasley’s flowers, but only asked, “What do you want to do?”  
  
“Set a trap for Smoke and Mirrors,” Draco said. “By calling him out.” He smiled at Harry. “You and I are too famous to be his victims, but other people aren’t.”  
  
*  
  
“What you’re doing borders on the immoral.”  
  
Harry blinked and glanced up. He and Draco had been deep in discussion of the obscure person they would cook up as the perfect victim for Smoke and Mirrors, and he hadn’t heard Rudie enter the office. Draco’s shoulders tensed and his head tossed, which meant he hadn’t, either.  
  
But he turned around with a pleasant enough smile on his face, though Harry thought Rudie a fool if she took that seriously. “Why, whatever do you mean?” he asked.  
  
Rudie had a vial in her hand containing a silvery liquid. “You need to see this,” she said. “It’s a memory of Nicolette firecalling me last night.”  
  
“Because, of course, we keep Pensieves lying around.” Draco smiled at her and tapped Harry with an elbow.  
  
Harry stood up and walked around the desk. Rudie looked the way she had when he and Draco first met her, after interviewing her on a case where she’d battled a twisted and lost her first partner. “There’s another way,” he said. “If someone takes the memory and puts it directly in their mind. Is that what you want us to do?”  
  
Rudie nodded, slight, tense, quick. “Yes.” She uncapped the vial.  
  
Draco stepped up between them and held out his hand. “You’ll permit me to examine the vial for taints first, of course,” he said.  
  
Rudie stepped back. Her hand was on her wand, which she had drawn whisper-quick, and from the way her eyes darkened, Harry decided that she distrusted Draco more than she did him. Perhaps Macgeorge had hinted that Draco was the one who wanted her to use her necromancy. Harry didn’t know why she would care otherwise. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Sometimes a vial isn’t properly cleaned,” Draco told her, only the muscles of his mouth moving out of all the muscles in his face. “That means the next potion poured into it can be contaminated by the traces of the prior potion that remain. I simply want to make sure that hasn’t happened to this memory.”  
  
Rudie widened her eyes and stood so still for a moment that Harry thought she would object. Then she handed the vial over.  
  
Draco performed a number of small and intricate charms on it, peering at it in a way that made Harry wonder what he saw, and if he would let Harry take the memory into his head. Then he gave the most minute of shrugs and turned around, holding the vial out to Harry. “It seems to be clean.”  
  
Harry looked into his face as he took the vial. Draco made a small swirling gesture with one hand.  _It is clean, but you’re going to be the one to put the memory into your mind._  
  
Harry didn’t object to that. He didn’t distrust Rudie, but on the other hand, he had no idea what her background was with things like Legilimency and Occlumency. He stuck his wand into the memory and pulled; the silver strand followed his wand up. Harry laid it next to his ear and closed his eyes, trying not to remember the last time he had done this, after Lionel had died.  
  
Then Rudie’s memory took over, and he couldn’t think about Lionel.  
  
 _The colors in front of him were subdued and grainy. Harry blinked at brown curtains, wood panels on the wall, and beige carpeting, and shook his head. Rudie wasn’t much of a decorator.  
  
In the midst of all that dimness, Rudie’s blonde hair shone where she knelt before the fire. Harry forged his way to her, feeling as though he walked through knee-high waters, and leaned so he could see over her shoulder.  
  
Some of the difficulty in walking came from the emotions Rudie was feeling, Harry realized when he saw Macgeorge’s face. Rudie had been shocked by the sight of her partner when she firecalled, and the shock had bled into anger and fear, which turned the air of the room nearly to smoke.  
  
“Tell me what you’ve been doing,” Rudie said, her knuckles skinned from her grip on the rough bricks in front of the hearth. “I think you owe me that much, at least.”  
  
“I don’t owe you anything.” Macgeorge held her cloak in front of her and shivered as if she was cold. Her eyes were encircled in dark blood, a mask that continued down the front of her face and onto her chin. Her fingers were thinner and bonier than Harry remembered from his last sight of her, as though she’d pared flesh away from them for use in necromancy. Macgeorge opened her mouth to speak again, and Harry saw the brown color her teeth had turned. “We’ve worked together as partners for a few months. You aren’t involved in this investigation, and we don’t have any current cases right now where you would require my presence. That’s the end of it.”  
  
“If you’re on a case, then I should be with you,” Rudie said, and leaned forwards until she nearly went face-first into the fire. Harry wondered if she had noticed, as he did, the way that Macgeorge’s teeth snapped at each other when that happened. “That’s what partners means. That’s what we _are. _”  
  
There was a little silence, and Harry thought he detected a softening in Macgeorge’s eyes that might have signaled she was going to listen. But then she twitched her head away and shook it. Rudie watched as a wisp of her hair came loose and tumbled down her neck, continuing until it lay on the invisible floor.  
  
“I think that’s what you think we are,” Macgeorge said, her voice harsh and cool. “That doesn’t mean it’s true. And it doesn’t mean that you have the right to accompany me into the darker waters.”  
  
“That’s not the first time you’ve given me this babble about ‘darker waters’ and not explained what you meant,” Rudie said, and clasped her hands in front of her as though she was about to dive. “Is it—does it have something to do with your necromancy?”  
  
Macgeorge turned around so fast that Harry winced. She stared at her partner in silence for long minutes, except for the wheezing breath that worked in and out between her cracked teeth. Rudie didn’t move and didn’t speak, which was more self-control than Harry had given her credit for.  
  
“You weren’t to know about that,” Macgeorge said, and sounded as if she was upset with someone who wasn’t present. “You weren’t to _know.”  
  
 _“When my partner starts acting oddly, then I investigate all the possible avenues of knowledge I can,” Rudie said flatly. “And it’s not as though I didn’t know about your affinity with the dead, not with that bloody paperweight on your desk. So. Is it that, then?”  
  
Macgeorge did a little more breathing, then said, “I don’t thinks continuing this conversation will be profitable to either of us. Good-bye, Rudie.”  
  
Rudie lunged forwards, nearly singing her hair, and shouted, “Nicolette! Wait! What if profit isn’t the only thing I care about in my partner?”  
  
But she shouted to an empty fireplace. The Floo connection had shut, and Harry could feel the silent ringing refusal of its magic to carry her message._  
  
The memory ended. Harry opened his eyes, shook his head, and lifted his wand to his temple to transfer the memory back to Rudie.   
  
“You don’t need to,” Rudie had started to say, but Harry could deal with the minor echoes of the memory better than he could the despair that had haunted the whole conversation. He solemnly handed the strand back to her, and Rudie ducked her head before accepting it on her wand and into her mind.  
  
“We are not responsible for whatever your partner did,” Draco said, his arms folded. He had already decided, Harry knew, from one quick glance at Harry’s face, that there was no way to put this off or pretend it didn’t matter, or that Macgeorge hadn’t helped them. “It’s true we asked for her help—once. After we gave her certain information, we didn’t see or hear from her again.”  
  
Harry cocked his head, silently interrogating Draco as to whether he was going to mention the blue-eyed twisted to Rudie. Draco remained still, and Harry checked a sigh. He thought it couldn’t do any harm, and might help Rudie if she knew what to look for and Macgeorge showed up again with blue eyes, but he wouldn’t undermine Draco in front of someone else, either. That wasn’t what they were partners for.  
  
“I want to know what the information was.” Rudie stood with her hands on her hips and her feet spread wide apart, as though bracing against a charge.  
  
“Why?” Draco sneered at her. “You said yourself that you don’t already know. If Macgeorge wanted you to know, she would have mentioned it. To talk to you is to betray her trust.”  
  
Harry remembered a time, only a few months ago, when that would have made Rudie, as the youngest Socrates Auror, back down with furrowed lines in her brow. Now she simply shook her head, once, twice, and her hair swirled and fell around her like flames. “I don’t believe that,” she said simply. “Not now. Nicolette might have thought it best to keep it from me—although she had to know that I would support anything she did—but I don’t think she can make the decisions for herself anymore.” She looked at Harry. “You saw her face.”  
  
Draco glanced at him again. Harry met his gaze, trying to put everything he could into his eyes, and nodded.  
  
Draco sighed like a teakettle sputtering out the last drops of steam. “All  _right_ ,” he said, and waved his wand to tighten the anti-eavesdropping wards on the office door. “Macgeorge was looking into the body of one of the victims for us, the latest one, Michael Moxon. She asked questions and answers appeared on strips of skin torn from the body. I also got her a vial of his blood, and she’s been looking at it. I have no idea what she might have discovered in the blood or why it took her like that. We haven’t seen her much since then.”  
  
“That’s not everything.”  
  
Draco blinked. Harry folded his arms and waited. He would let Draco make the decisions, since Harry had seen the memory and might be overly influenced by Rudie’s concern for her partner, but honestly, he thought it would make the most sense to explain the blue-eyed twisted. Rudie obviously noticed when they left things out anyway.  
  
*  
  
Draco would have liked to take Harry into another room and explain to him, but that wasn’t an option with Rudie standing right in front of them and glaring as if Draco had killed her Crup.  
  
The blue-eyed twisted had so far chosen Draco and Harry as enemies, and Macgeorge as a victim. Draco thought it was more because she had aided them than for any other reason, which meant Rudie was in no danger as long as she didn’t become involved in the Smoke and Mirrors case. That meant that they didn’t have to explain, either, and that in fact it might be dangerous to do so, as it would draw the blue-eyed twisted’s attention.  
  
But Draco had not thought Rudie would pick up on his omission, and he had no backing story prepared. He glanced at Harry, who glanced at him, and wore his bleeding-heart expression openly in his eyes. Draco sneered, and sighed, and turned back to Rudie.  
  
“There is a twisted who hunts us as we hunt him,” he said shortly. “We’ve seen signs of him for months now, beginning with the first case we handled together, when Harry saw him in Okazes.”  
  
“Saw him  _in_  Okazes?” Rudie strained nearer, then caught herself with one hand on her desk when she would have tumbled forwards. Draco allowed himself a smile of petty triumph, which was ruined when Rudie didn’t look in his direction. “Tell me what that means.”  
  
“He possesses people,” Harry said, which ruined all the neat explanations Draco might have come up with. “You can tell because their eyes turn blue. We saw it happen to Macgeorge the other day. They have no memory of what happened while they were possessed, and they feel a foulness in their minds.”  
  
Something, perhaps the flatness of his voice, made Rudie stare at him. Then she murmured, “You had that happen to you, too.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I fought the possession off in time, so I can’t say I had the full experience.” Draco wondered if he had ever looked as bitter as Harry had in that moment, his eyes full of cold coals, his hands locked as though gripping the edge of a shield. “But in general, that’s the way it works. We have no idea who he is, or where he is, or what the limitations of his flaw are. We only know he hates us, and that he’s been interfering in our cases as long as we’ve been handling them.”  
  
Rudie was silent for a moment, eyes flickering back and forth between them. Then she said, “You ought to have told all of us about this the moment it happened, you realize. Or else the moment we came into the division.”  
  
“We chose not to,” Draco said coolly. “Perhaps that is a choice we will pay for. We’re willing to pay the price.”  
  
“And if Nicolette does it, and not you?” Rudie said, touching one hand to her mouth. “Oh, I forgot, you never liked her. Of course that means you’re willing to pay.”  
  
And she whirled and strode out with her whole back bristling with indignation. Draco shook his head. He could have said many things, including that he distrusted Macgeorge because she had pried at them from the beginning and declared a sexual interest in his partner, but Rudie would not welcome the words at the moment.  
  
“That could have gone better.”  
  
Draco turned back to Harry. “I refuse to accept responsibility for what has happened to Macgeorge,” he said. “She knew the risks of necromancy, and if she is now in trouble because of them—”  
  
“We could have handled it better,” Harry said, with the calm coolness that meant he wouldn’t discuss it anymore, and turned his back so that he was facing the desk again. “I still don’t understand the outlines of this plan you have to trap Smoke and Mirrors. How does it work?”  
  
“You didn’t understand me because we were interrupted before I could explain,” Draco murmured, but he strode back to the table and picked up a list of facts he had begun creating, headed with the name  _Sarah Nickell._  
  
“You refused to talk about it last night except to congratulate yourself for being such a genius.”  
  
Draco bowed his head until the same prickling irritation had come and gone, and said, “I should have said something then.” Harry’s gape when he apologized was still precious to him, but it would vanish if Draco drew attention to it, so he continued instead. “We create a list of facts about someone named Sarah who doesn’t exist. No one more obscure than that, or more suited to this twisted’s desire to tell the truth.”  
  
“You’re sure someone with the name Sarah Nickell doesn’t exist in the wizarding world, then?” Harry looked doubtfully at the list.  
  
“I checked the Ministry birth records for the last hundred and fifty years this morning,” Draco said. “We’re safe.”  
  
Harry nodded. “And when Smoke and Mirrors starts trying to find out more about her?”  
  
Draco smiled. “A few carefully-cast glamours, some comfortable positions, and we can wait for him.”


	12. A Watch on the Twisted

“You want me to talk about her? Why?”  
  
Skeeter’s quill hovered above the parchment. Harry bit hard at his lip. Trust her to ask questions and act like a responsible reporter at the moment that they were trusting her  _not_ to be that. He cast a glance under lowered eyelids at Draco.  
  
For a moment, he thought Draco would stay back the way he had when Harry was giving the first interview to Skeeter and leave everything up to him, but then Draco uttered a gracious little sigh and stepped forwards. “I think that you misunderstood what we’re asking you to do, Madam Skeeter,” he murmured. “We’re asking you to offer tantalizing little  _hints_ to the public. Not everything. Because this twisted will be scared off by too much information.” Harry nodded. That was a good compromise between a complete lie that Skeeter would distrust and the truth, which might lead to Skeeter publicizing everything and Smoke and Mirrors losing interest because then their created Sarah Nickell would be too famous for him. “Simply point out those facts we revealed to you in discreet and interesting ways. Think of the way that you wrote Albus Dumbledore’s biography. You had to keep your readers interested up until the twentieth chapter, and revealing everything juicy in the first one wouldn’t have been the way to do it.”  
  
Skeeter cooed and fluffed her hair, while Harry shot Draco an incredulous look.  _You_ read  _that rubbish?_ he tried to say with lips that barely moved.  
  
Draco shrugged at him and rolled his eyes. Harry thought he understood,  _No. But I know enough to realize how she works._  
  
That sounded a lot better than Draco staring in fascination at the pages that purported Dumbledore and Harry had had sex. Harry turned back with relief to Skeeter, who was sitting up with a serious expression on her face, nodding slightly.  
  
“It makes sense when you explain it that way,  _Auror_ Malfoy,” she said. “A little bit at a time, to enable you to track him down.”  
  
“Exactly,” Draco said, and closed one eye in a conspiratorial wink that would have made Harry gag if he wasn’t stronger than that.  
  
Skeeter chuckled and began doing what they had wanted her to all along, which was writing down the barest facts about Sarah Nickell in a way that Harry and Draco hoped would intrigue Smoke and Mirrors without frightening him off or making their imaginary victim too famous for him. Harry watched her thoughtfully, and looked at Draco, who stood with the expression of a martyr on his face.  
  
Perhaps sometimes it  _was_ worthwhile going along to get along, and using less direct methods, if they yielded results like this.  
  
*  
  
“Are you sure that you’re going to be comfortable?”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes, and then rolled over on the blanket, startling Harry, who paused in spreading his own blanket beside him. “More likely to be comfortable than you,” Draco murmured, keeping one eye on the house in front of them, a run-down hovel that they had chosen to pretend Sarah Nickell, reclusive witch who had invented a number of love potions, or perhaps lust potions, or perhaps hate potions, lived in. “I have a thicker blanket.”  
  
“The point isn’t to be comfortable,” Harry said, and shook out his blanket as though he was trying to show off its fluffiness to Draco and disprove his point. Since Draco could see the starlight shining through some of the tatters in it, that didn’t really work. “We have to keep awake in case he comes.”  
  
“So your blanket is like that because you don’t want to fall  _asleep?_ ” Draco asked, turning back to face the house fully again. “Or just because you can’t be arsed to learn and use  _Reparo_ properly?”  
  
Harry made some sulky retort. Draco didn’t listen to him, instead watching the front door of the house and listening to the creaks around him. They were protected by strong, anchored wards, but that didn’t make much difference when they were in the Forbidden Forest, watching the cottage from behind the root of a gnarled tree.  
  
Of course, this stratagem limited them in the first place. Sarah Nickell couldn’t live in London or Hogsmeade or Ottery St. Catchpole or any other place with a relatively large population of wizards; Harry and Draco couldn’t bribe them all, as they had Skeeter, to pretend that she existed. And it made sense that someone who didn’t want others to know about her would live on a plot of land in the Forest that she had acquired through Merlin knew what shady transaction. All this land was supposed to belong to Hogwarts, but Skeeter had been kind enough to hint otherwise in her article. Something else that should draw Smoke and Mirrors over to them, if they were lucky.  
  
Or unlucky.  
  
Draco reached out again with his wand to touch the wards that encircled them. Harry claimed that he had got his friend Granger to teach him some of the spells that would keep them hidden, supposedly undetectable by any physical sense, until Smoke and Mirrors showed up. Draco only knew he hadn’t had to deal with the weasel-loving woman yet, and he was content to keep it that way.  
  
“Don’t touch them,” Harry murmured, curling up on the blanket next to him. “They’re supposed to hold from the outside, not the inside.”  
  
“What you’re saying is that they’re fragile,” Draco said, grinning up at the stars and listening to Harry’s splutter from beside him.  
  
“Not exactly,” Harry said at last, and reached out to clasp Draco’s hand. “But I don’t know much about these spells, other than that I couldn’t see or smell or hear anything from outside. I would just as soon not disrupt them.”  
  
Draco tilted his head in silent agreement, and resumed watching. Harry moved up beside him and settled into a position with his head on his arms that Draco wouldn’t have found comfortable. Then again, he wasn’t Harry.  
  
Draco’s chest loosened, despite the danger, until he was breathing delicately and deliciously, seeming to draw in more air each time until it swelled and filled his head. The slight sounds of Harry shifting his weight behind him and the squeaks and hisses and groans of animals in the Forest behind him filled him up the same way, until he felt totally relaxed and totally alert, both at once.  
  
They hadn’t done much of this, he and Harry, waiting for criminals. Of course, most of their kills so far had been during flat-out chases or hostage situations, not ambushes.  
  
It was almost nice to be doing something so  _normal._ Normal for Auror partners, at least. Draco remembered ambushes with Kellen, where they had waited side by side and seemed to breathe for each other, and the soft murmurs of small talk they had exchanged back and forth.  
  
“Do you need to talk about your parents?” Harry asked quietly. Draco glanced at him and saw that he had curled up in an even more absurd position with his hands beneath his chin like some sort of big cat, his eyes fixed on Draco.  
  
 _Not small talk like this._ Then again, he and Kellen Moonborn had never been lovers.  
  
“Why would I?” Draco studied the front door of the broken-down house, and turned his head when a shadow moved in the corner of his vision. It wasn’t a smoke-clad figure of Dark magic, however, only a deer. It jerked its head up once, but went on grazing, though with ears turned in the direction of the house. Draco relaxed. If their wards could fool an animal’s sensitive nose, then he had more confidence when it came to Smoke and Mirrors.  
  
“Because we did end up hurting them,” Harry said. “If accidentally. And they must have figured out what happened by now, and that will make them more prejudiced against you than ever.”  
  
Draco sighed as his relaxation dissolved again. But Harry couldn’t have known he was talking about something absolutely inappropriate for the setting, by Draco’s measure.  
  
But what else would they talk about? Harry’s abusive relatives? His friends Draco couldn’t stand? Their own relationship, which seemed even more inappropriate? The blue-eyed twisted and his violent possessive magic? Macgeorge?  
  
 _Our lives are a mixture of Dark Arts and violence,_ Draco thought, as he sat up and stretched.  _Rather sad, really._  
  
“I know that they’re prejudiced against me,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the house still. Another shifting shadow, but he saw it was four-legged, and discounted the immediate leap of suspicion. Smoke and Mirrors’ usual disguise wouldn’t extend that far, he thought. He meant to baffle sight, not make himself look like an entirely different creature. “I never had any hope of becoming the Malfoy heir again, except for the five minutes when I believed that I could reconcile them to you.”  
  
Harry snorted quietly. “Still,” he said, and waited.  
  
Draco laced his fingers on his knee, and thought about it. He wondered if he could make Harry understand what it had been like to lose everything, and then be offered the promise of regaining it.  
  
Probably not, because Draco didn’t come close to understanding it himself. He had lived for seven years with a constricted chest, counting his Galleons, devoting himself to duty and taking more dangerous cases than he would have otherwise because he knew that his family wouldn’t grieve. Then he had the chance of a golden, glittering future offered again.  
  
Except that by then he had Harry, and except that his capacity to believe in that future had withered over the seven years since the last offer. Deprivation made his heart stony, not more yielding, not more yearning. He wanted what his parents had seemed to offer, but as a dream. Not something he had believed, deeply, could come true.  
  
He stumbled his way through a few lines of that, and stopped. Harry reached out, and squeezed his shoulder.  
  
“There was a time when I thought I would give anything for my relatives to love me,” Harry whispered. “And then I realized that wasn’t true, anymore. Maybe I could dream of it, treasure it, wish for it, but _believing_ in it? No. If they had said that they loved me one day, I would have decided they were all under Imperius.”  
  
Draco reached back and silently squeezed Harry’s hand. Harry leaned his head on Draco’s shoulder in response.  
  
Draco half-shut his eyes.  _No, we don’t make normal small talk. We may never live normal lives and go home at the end of each day and cook together and argue together and listen to the wireless together like a normal couple.  
  
But there are things we can do. And I would rather have them._  
  
*  
  
Harry had mostly waited with Ron in situations like this one before now to catch a criminal approaching a target, or a Dark wizard they had lured by spreading the rumors of an exciting cache of Potions ingredients, or animal skins, or whatever it was that they found themselves compelled to steal. Ron made jokes all the time and napped and woke the moment Harry moved.   
  
Lauren Hale had observed Harry with constant, quiet hostility in her eyes during the one watch they’d shared together, but then, the hostility was  _always_ constant. At least it was quiet.  
  
And he had shared an ambush with Lionel only twice, both times tormented by the knowledge that he was falling in love with him. Lionel joked even more than Ron did and rocked on his heels, peering forwards and making little muttered remarks out of the side of his mouth about the way that  _he_ would have set things up if he was the Ministry. Harry had watched him and thought everything he did perfect.  
  
Draco was different from all of his other Auror partners, so it shouldn’t have surprised Harry that he waited differently than they did. But he hadn’t known what the source of the difference would be, or how it would affect him.  
  
Draco breathed gently through his mouth and never spoke, after that brief conversation, unless Harry spoke to him. He turned his head from side to side at the slightest sound, and didn’t seem to believe that the deer and the lone centaur they saw wending their way through the Forest wouldn’t glimpse them, despite Harry’s trust in Hermione’s wards. He lay there and seemed to retreat into himself, enfold his being in silence.  
  
But Harry was still sure he was  _there,_ for all that, present and ready to leap to Harry’s aid if he was threatened.  
  
Harry lay down beside him and let his head rest on Draco’s shoulder, finally. It was the only way he could be close enough to express what he felt without somehow hindering Draco’s wand arm.  
  
Draco gave him a fleeting smile and then fixated on the house again as something moved near the door. This time, the figure resolved into one on two legs. Harry still squinted and blinked, thinking he saw flashes and edges of faces swarming over it, and then the corners of soot and darkness that he had glimpsed when they went after Smoke and Mirrors in the Three Broomsticks.  
  
“Him,” Draco said, shaping the word with his lips so that Harry felt the puff of air behind the word more than he heard the sound.  
  
Harry nodded, and stood up.  
  
Draco was gliding behind him, his hands resting at the very edge of the wards. Harry flickered a glance at him, and raised his eyebrows. Draco nodded back to him, the movement jerky, and crouched, his hand still flexing out.  
  
Harry felt a thrill run through him. It was like the silent conversations he had used to have with Ron and Lionel, but better.  
  
Smoke and Mirrors circled the house, peering in at the cracked windows, and halted again near the door. Harry hoped he wouldn’t allow the apparently deserted state of the house to put him off. Then again, Skeeter had hinted in her article that Sarah Nickell, mysterious and odd witch that she was, liked to live under glamours that would convince a casual passer-by that no one was in the house at all, unless they came close enough to force her to reveal herself.  
  
Smoke and Mirrors raised his wand—or so Harry thought the odd twitch of shadow probably was meant to be, under the glamour. He held his breath and shifted closer, and Draco was there, right behind him, shoulder to shoulder, skin against skin, and they broke the wards and charged after Smoke and Mirrors as one creature.  
  
The blurred figure spun towards them. Draco hissed. Harry knew without asking that he had felt the scalding splash of Dark magic on his left arm again.  
  
He didn’t need to ask. He knew without asking. Harry stretched himself out to run in the faint moonlight, and the connections between him and his partner and their prey throbbed.  
  
He knew that Smoke and Mirrors would dart left before he did it, and spun to stop him.  
  
They crashed against each other, and Harry felt something rake down his side. It felt like a knife, but he couldn’t see it, and he didn’t dare risk staying that close until he knew more. He kicked out, at least, as he spun away and felt blood flowing down his ribs, and had the satisfaction of hearing Smoke and Mirrors grunt in what sounded like agony.  
  
Draco shouted, and Harry flowed to his feet and to the side. His muscles knew what Draco was going to do, and on some level, so did his brain, even if Draco hadn’t explained it with words.  
  
Smoke and Mirrors, rising behind Harry and stabbing down at him with what might have been that hidden knife, took Draco’s curse in the chest. His knife flew away, and Harry heard a distinct breath like a sob. Then he crashed to the forest floor, and began writhing and screaming in a way that made Harry flinch.  
  
He scrambled up and stared at Draco, who shrugged back at him and made his way towards Smoke and Mirrors with his wand still out. “I’ll use what I need to stop him,” Draco said. “And it’s not as though you haven’t sometimes done worse.”  
  
Harry nodded, slowly. Then he stood up and moved behind Draco. He would cover him from that direction if Smoke and Mirrors had protections or allies waiting, although Harry doubted it. Whatever this man was, he seemed to be the kind who normally worked alone.   
  
Draco knelt down beside the thrashing figure, and waited. Harry wasn’t sure what for, at first, until he realized that the thrashing had calmed a little, and Smoke and Mirrors was making sounds that weren’t screams, but more like pitiful whimpers for attention and explanation. Then Draco moved his wand down, his eyes closed, his face bone-white with concentration.  
  
And Smoke and Mirrors’ disguise blew apart with an arching fury of Dark magic that flung Harry from his feet and made the twisted scream once again.  
  
*  
  
Draco opened his eyes. He knew he was smiling, and that the sight would hardly be reassuring for either Smoke and Mirrors or Harry, but the first of them didn’t deserve to be reassured, and Harry…  
  
Well. He would put up with it, that was all.  
  
Why should Macgeorge be the only one who could focus and use her flaw? Draco had focused on clarifying the throb of Dark magic along his Mark, and demanded more information about it when the pain had begun to subside. The more he thought about it, the more magic came to him, and finally there was nothing more for him to learn—except by destroying the illusion and seeing what lay beneath.  
  
What lay beneath was a tall, lanky young wizard with brown hair that dangled in his face and the bluest eyes Draco had ever seen on someone not possessed by their enemy. He tensed at first, in fact, thinking that perhaps the blue-eyed twisted  _was_ here, but these eyes didn’t shine in the same way. They had pupils, too, which didn’t usually happen when their old enemy made them shine.  
  
Smoke and Mirrors cowered the moment he realized that Draco was looking him in the face, and tossed an arm over it, and tried to roll aside. Draco shot an arm out and casually stopped him. At the touch of his hand, Smoke and Mirrors shivered, and moaned, and collapsed. Draco smiled. A handy side-effect of the curse he’d used, which was another one he had picked up in his reading among his parents’ books.  
  
“Do you recognize him at all?” Harry asked, crouching down on the other side of Smoke and Mirrors and watching their prey carefully.  
  
Draco shook his head regretfully. “I had hoped I would,” he admitted. If Smoke and Mirrors was a pure-blood, Draco might have seen the general family resemblance, and they would have a place to begin looking.  
  
But those blue eyes were either a product of a Muggleborn parent or of magic tinkering in the womb. Draco settled back with a sigh and said, “He doesn’t look like any of the reports that you’ve studied in the past few months?” Harry had a passion for staring at files on wizards reported missing. He claimed that they could perhaps spot the next twisted that way, but Draco knew it came from his hero complex, more than anything else.  
  
“No,” Harry said, after subjecting the twisted to a stare so intense that the man cowered again. So he was sane enough to note fear and threats, Draco thought. Well, that made sense, given that he had run from the scene of his crimes and left no obvious clues behind, only the ones that his insanity or his flaw compelled him to. “I suppose we can do worse than begin at the beginning. What’s your name?” he asked the twisted.  
  
Draco repressed the urge to roll his eyes. Yes, they  _could_ do that, but the twisted was as likely to lie as anything else. Most of the time, they had known the name of their prey before they began hunting and didn’t need to rely on them for information.   
  
To Draco’s amazement, the man lying on the ground hesitantly cleared his throat and said, “Wallace. Wallace—Bainbridge.”  
  
The last name might be a lie; the first one didn’t sound like it. Draco sat back further and turned the questioning over to Harry with a cock of his head and a minute twist of his mouth. Harry looked like the one who might get better results right now.  
  
Draco turned back to face the Forest. It wasn’t impossible that Bainbridge could have allies out there, still, or might use a distraction from that direction to attempt escape.   
  
Besides, this was still the Forbidden Forest, for all that they had turned it into the scene of a trap. Best to have an extra pair of eyes.  
  
*  
  
Harry took his time sitting down next to Bainbridge, making it seem from the way he stretched and settled himself that he wanted to relax. He’d learned the technique from Lionel, and it worked this time, too. When he faced Bainbridge, the twisted had gone still and looked at Harry the way he might a casually-met stranger and not an Auror.  
  
Harry smiled slightly, and held his eyes. “How many people have you told the truth about?” he asked.  
  
Bainbridge reached up, faster than Harry, and clasped his wrist. Harry quietly transferred his wand to his left hand, but Bainbridge seemed uninterested. Instead, he stared at Harry and blinked several times. “You know?” he whispered. “You know what I was trying to do?” His arm relaxed, the hand almost slumping to the ground. “And I didn’t have to tell you.”  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows, but said, “I know you wanted to tell the truth about people you considered neglected. Everything you wrote on Adriana Lugar’s skin was the truth, wasn’t it? And the same was true about Michael Moxon.”  
  
“Yes,” Bainbridge said simply, while his face burned with hope. “That’s it. That’s  _it._ Everyone in the world deserves to have their story as well-known as yours. You aren’t a horrible person,” he added, as though he thought Harry might blame him. “But they have all those secrets. The ones that other people neglected or never tried to find out about. They need the chance to have other people read them.”  
  
Harry nodded, while trying to repress the little stir of emotion that said maybe Bainbridge would be the first of the twisted they could take alive. It depended on how well his flaw might let him escape. “Could you contact them and ask them to write their life-stories?” he asked. “Not skin them and write them in blood.”  
  
Bainbridge shook his head, slow as slow, back and forth between two pebbles. “They would always forget something. This is the only sure way.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to ask another question, and Draco said, “ _Harry_ ,” in a voice as sharp as a log cracking.  
  
Harry moved so he could look where Draco was sitting without taking his eyes off Bainbridge—  
  
And faltered as Macgeorge emerged from the forest, jaw hanging like a skull’s, her fingers scrabbling at her face.  
  
In that moment of pity tearing like a thrown nail through Harry, Bainbridge  _moved._


	13. Bring Down the Skull

Bainbridge stretched his hand out before him. His fingers were wrinkled—like, Draco thought, the root they had spent some time hiding behind before they saw Bainbridge approach the house. His face was shining, his teeth bared like the teeth of a skull left underground for years.  
  
And his hand was aimed at Macgeorge, not Draco, the way Draco had been sure it would be. Harry was far too famous for Bainbridge to use his magic on, but he might have changed his mind about Draco, who no longer shared his family’s prestige.  
  
The hunger, though, was all directed at Macgeorge, and from the tips of Bainbridge’s fingers came a twisting black torrent, forked all through with lightning, ringing with thunder. Bainbridge’s fingers curled up and then down, moving completely independent of the hand that bore them in a way that caused Draco’s mouth to dry up, and then he snapped his hands together in a sharp clap.  
  
Macgeorge halted in her pacing towards them. Her jaw opened wider and wider, and she uttered a short, shrill scream that was almost more horrible than the way Bainbridge’s hand moved.  
  
Darkness rose around her, flowed around her, in answer. Bones poured out of the leaves at her feet and assembled themselves in front of her—the skeletons of mice left by owls, squirrels killed by foxes, the hundred and one tiny debris of hundreds of corpses seized and eaten and left to lie. They stood on trembling paws and looked at Bainbridge with empty eyes, and then leaped into the path of that torrent.  
  
Bainbridge’s magic knocked the bones aside, cracking them, crisping them, and ripping back the outer casing of white on them. Draco thought it was all he could do to flay victims that didn’t have skin.  
  
Macgeorge chanted something and then clapped her hands together. The bones began to flow, assembling an animal much larger than the ones that they had belonged to, a skull composed of skulls on top of a spine composed of a dozen separate kinds of vertebrae, all of them bobbing gently in the air, connected with invisible string. Draco stared.  
  
He had never heard of any necromancer who could do this, or anything more complicated than sometimes talking to the dead, and he wondered what books Macgeorge had found, and how she had managed to avoid coming to the attention of the Ministry.  
  
Macgeorge gestured with both hands, and the creature began to stomp forwards. Bainbridge stood to meet it with his fists lashing, his magic bobbing up and down in chains from his wrists and reaching out, and Draco suspected that he could crack the bones open and suck the marrow out, or otherwise destroy Macgeorge’s defense, as easily as he had cracked the first set of them.  
  
“Draco!”  
  
Harry’s hand was on his arm, and Harry was all but shouting into his face. Draco jerked and flinched back, then realized that Harry was dragging him back towards the broken house, and that it probably  _would_ be a good idea to get under shelter, instead of sitting there like an idiot and waiting for Macgeorge to kill him.  
  
 _Or Bainbridge._ Although he might disdain to flay famous victims alive and write the truth in blood on their skins, Draco doubted that Bainbridge would hesitate to kill them if they got in his way, either.  
  
He nodded and leaped behind one of the sagging walls, tracing a few shields in front of him with his wand. Harry grunted and went the opposite direction. Draco heard him scuffling in the dirt, setting up some of the same spells.  
  
Draco peered out. If there was any way that they could capture Bainbridge and take him in, then they should. The whole point of this trap, of this case, was to capture Smoke and Mirrors, and retreating made sense only because they understood neither kind of magic that was flying around in this combat and it was important not to die.  
  
At the moment, though, Draco had to admit that he was savoring the chance to watch two people with flaws fight. If he had to use his own flaw in battle, it might give him some advice he needed.  
  
And for the moment, they were evenly matched. Bainbridge’s dark power continued to twist and flow towards Macgeorge, but she continued to call more bones. Small skeletons pelted through the air, fastening themselves to the “creature’s” spine. Its feet grew heavier, making whole paws into its talons. And when it whipped a tail made of vertebrae and charged, the ground shook beneath it.  
  
Bainbridge didn’t try to stand his ground in the face of that charge. He rolled off to the side, burying himself in leaves for a moment, and then leaped to his feet. He was chanting something now, touching his wand to the coil of what looked like whirling smoke that hung from his wrist.  
  
Draco hissed and grabbed his left arm. There was that pain again, the sensation of dipping his Mark in boiling tar and acid both at once. It seemed that it happened when Bainbridge used Dark magic in conjunction with his flaw, not his flaw alone.  
  
Not that Draco had the slightest idea of  _what_ the fuck Bainbridge was doing.  
  
Macgeorge didn’t, either, but she pulled her creature up and set it to stomping and rocking in place instead. The ground beneath Bainbridge’s feet trembled, and he lost track of his place in a chant. Draco felt the pressure on his Mark ease slightly. Bainbridge lifted his head and hissed at Macgeorge in return.  
  
Draco backed away before he could stop himself, even though he was under shelter and some protective magic and there was no sign that Bainbridge was about to stop his battle to notice and finish them. Bainbridge’s face had gone smooth, and the dark magic that had concealed him when he was Smoke and Mirrors had started to slide over it. Draco didn’t know exactly what it was, whether his flaw was adapted to that or it was a protective spell that would return when he called it, but it was something Draco preferred not to face.  
  
Bainbridge moved one step forwards. Macgeorge called her creature back towards her, and then touched its spine and whispered something else.  
  
The spine exploded. Creatures rose into the air on delicate wings, assembling heads out of skulls and fangs out of parts of small animal bodies that Draco preferred not to contemplate. Now looking like large bats, they soared towards Bainbridge, and he turned and lifted his arms to meet them, the dark magic sliding and flowing and lashing.  
  
Draco leaned out as far as he could when he heard a hiss that definitely wasn’t either of the mad people they were watching. Harry was leaning out as far as  _he_ could, gesturing to Macgeorge. Draco wanted to beat his brains out against the side of the house at his partner’s stupidity, but that would only give Bainbridge an unfair advantage.  
  
Macgeorge gave no sign of hearing Harry, even when he softly called her first name. She was totally occupied in the battle, turning her hands back and forth to change the diving angles of the bats, snatching up any bits of bone when Bainbridge struck at them or destroyed them and assembling them into new creatures.  
  
“ _Nicolette,_ ” Harry said again, loudly enough that Draco started to incant a Silencing Charm, even though he didn’t know if he could get it around all the shields and wards that both of them had in the way.  
  
Macgeorge’s head turned. Her eyes weren’t blue, but Draco still found them hard to meet, with the intense madness in them.  
  
And then Bainbridge said something that lit the bone-bats on fire, and Macgeorge fell to her knees, shrieking, and Harry charged out of his hiding place, and Draco followed him, wondering why in the world he had to be  _the only sensible one._  
  
*  
  
Harry knew that attracting Bainbridge’s attention right now might not be the smartest thing he’d ever done, but Macgeorge was still a Socrates Auror like them, and someone who had only come into this case because he and Draco had asked her to help, and someone Rudie would miss and Harry would feel sorry for if she died.  
  
So he went out after her, while the flames danced on the bones and Bainbridge took a step towards her with his hand extended, his fingers curving down, as if he intended to pull her skin off starting at the level of her throat.  
  
Harry didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he would know when he got there. He kept his head bowed and his legs grimly churning along in front of him. His wand was in his hand, but his spells hovered behind his teeth, not verbalized as yet, not conscious, not chosen.  
  
“ _Stupefy._ ”  
  
Draco, from behind him, cast the Stunner neatly, slipping it over Harry’s shoulder and into Bainbridge’s back. Harry shook his head, waking from his daze, and admitting, if only to himself, that he should have done something like that before.  
  
Bainbridge staggered, but didn’t go down, probably because of the magic seething all over his body. Harry had never seen someone try Stunning a twisted cloaked by their flaw like that before. He did turn around, and his face was more skull-like than Macgeorge’s, some of the skin seeming to pull itself off and flow into the air to become more magic.  
  
Harry flung another Stunner at his feet, where less of the flaw seemed to be. Bainbridge hissed and staggered again, but maintained his feet and stepped closer.  
  
Macgeorge looked up and made a gesture with her hand that Harry had never seen before, one that seemed to twist through more dimensions than the human body had, and which left his eyes watering and his own steps faltering.  
  
Bainbridge screamed, once. Strips of skin were peeling off his legs, his arms, his hands, making them look more and more like the paperweight Macgeorge had once kept on her desk. Harry jerked to a stop, both because he didn’t want to get too close to whatever kind of necromancy Macgeorge was using and because his stomach was rebelling, leaping, churning, as he watched her do it.  
  
Draco’s hand closed on his arm. Harry leaned against him. At the moment, he was happy for Draco to do whatever he wanted in the name of keeping Harry safe. Harry had seen plenty of disgusting things on cases with Ron and Lionel, but never, precisely,  _this_.  
  
Sometimes new things could still be as horrifying.  
  
Macgeorge snapped her fingers the way she had when she was summoning some of the creatures, but this time it was skin and not bones that flew to her. The skin she had torn from Bainbridge twined around her fingers, and Harry’s stomach twitched again. Was this the way that Bainbridge flayed his victims? Was it possible for Macgeorge to inflict the punishment with her necromancy because she was drawing on his flaw somehow?  
  
If so, then it didn’t last much longer. Bainbridge threw his head back and uttered an agonized screech, one that seemed to come from the back of his throat and made Harry throw his hands over his ears. Then he vanished.  
  
Macgeorge stood there for a few seconds with the tatters of magic still waving around her hands, the smoke that had come from Bainbridge and his flaw and the wavering swarm of bee-like hard objects that seemed to mark her necromancy. Then she wavered herself and fell forwards into the leaves, clutching her head and whimpering.  
  
Harry started towards her.  
  
Draco’s arm was back, slamming into his chest like the bar of a gate. Then Draco aimed his wand at Macgeorge and whispered a few words of a spell that Harry wasn’t familiar with, which made Macgeorge glow with a silver aura.  
  
“What are you doing?” Harry asked quietly. He would have yelled the words, at one time, but he had come to trust Draco enough not to do that.  
  
“Checking to make sure that she’s not possessed,” Draco said. “With one of the spells from the books that we’ve barely looked at.”  
  
Harry twitched his head a little. “We had other things to do, like setting the trap, and we could be sure that Smoke and Mirrors wasn’t possessed,” he muttered, but he laid his hand on Draco’s arm by way of apology. Draco nodded at him a little, which Harry thought was acceptance.   
  
“She’s not,” Draco said, when the silver glow had died. “But we should still approach her carefully. She’s used a lot of magic and not been in contact with her partner for days. Even if she likes Rudie less than Rudie likes her, that’s not a good sign.”  
  
Harry grunted and knelt down in front of Macgeorge where he stood, not moving closer. Draco sounded like the one who had been worried about Macgeorge from the beginning, the one who had absorbed Rudie’s memory, when that was really Harry and he was the one who should be more concerned. “Nicolette?”  
  
Her shoulders tightened, but she didn’t look up.  
  
Harry hesitated. She hadn’t really responded to her last name, either, when he was trying to get her attention earlier. Maybe something else would do. “Auror Macgeorge,” he said, imitating as best he could the crisp snap that the Deputy Head Auror would put into his voice, “Socrates Corps.”  
  
Macgeorge jerked her head up and stared around. Then she saw Harry and Draco, and visibly swallowed.  
  
“I thought Okazes was here,” she said, and climbed to her feet with a strained smile. She was still wearing her Auror robes, Harry saw, but they were as tattered as they would have been if she had spent a lot of time outside. “You—you haven’t seen him?”  
  
“We’re the only ones here.” Draco stood with his arms folded and his stare directly on her. He wasn’t touching Harry any longer, but Harry told himself he shouldn’t mind that, since he could feel the sturdy heat pouring towards him from the way that Draco stood at his side. “Did you think he would follow you for some reason?”  
  
Macgeorge shook her head and then took it in her hands. Harry stood up, but didn’t go near her when Draco gave him an impatient glance. All right, he could live with that prohibition.  
  
“It’s like a dream,” Macgeorge whispered. “I know that I came out to hunt the twisted, I know that I followed the blood, but I don’t remember anything beyond that.”  
  
“Moxon’s blood was screaming for justice?” Draco asked. Harry had never heard that phrase before, but then, he didn’t know anything about necromancy. He had done his part in coaxing Macgeorge back to awareness, so for now he remained quiet and listened, keeping one eye on her.  
  
“Yes.” Macgeorge looked at Draco for a moment as though wondering how  _he_ knew about it, but then turned back to Harry, who she seemed to have decided was her primary audience. “I can follow the trail of the killer if I enter the blood enough, if I ask the secrets of the dead. If.” She frowned and stopped, pushing her haggard face into her hands again. “If I  _become_ the dead, make my memories their own and live through their deaths. The ones they have the strongest connection to in this world, once they’re gone, are their killers.”  
  
Harry experienced a queasy moment of wondering if that had been true of his parents and Voldemort, and then pushed the thought away. At least they were at peace now, with Voldemort dead. “When did you decide to do that?”  
  
“After what happened to me in the Socrates office happened.” Macgeorge shuddered. “I thought Blue Eyes wouldn’t be able to corrupt my mind if I’d already buried it within the mind of someone else.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows. “A good idea, but not an effective prevention against other problems in this case. Do you remember firecalling Rudie?”  
  
“Isla?” A hard line formed between Macgeorge’s eyebrows. “She called me.”  
  
“She insists it was the other way around,” Harry said, before Draco could stop him. “Which makes sense, because she didn’t know where you were and marched into the Socrates office yesterday demanding to know.”  
  
Macgeorge licked her lips. Then she said, “I didn’t mean to cause that kind of problem. I was only following the blood.”  
  
“Why are you so interested in this case?” Harry had to ask. “Because we asked you to investigate?” It seemed odd to him that Macgeorge would have been experimenting with her necromancy for months but only lost control now. He wondered if the blue-eyed twisted had frightened her so badly as to push her over an edge she’d been walking.  
  
 _And what are we going to do if she really does lose control of her flaw?_  
  
Macgeorge nodded. “Yes. And I grew curious, I have to admit. I’ve thought of doing something like this before, but this is the first time where I had the opportunity and what seemed like a perfect motive to do so. Exercising my own curiosity wasn’t enough of a motive.”  
  
Draco nodded as if that was perfectly reasonable, though Harry didn’t think so, and then said, “Bainbridge fled, however. We will have to account this night’s plan a failure.”  
  
“Bainbridge?” Macgeorge stood up now, her robes swaying around her. “What was his first name? I can do much with a name.”  
  
“Wallace,” Draco said. “I think the first name is less likely to be a lie, but nothing he says can be fully trusted.” He eyed Macgeorge. “And before you do any more following of trails, in blood or otherwise, I think you should return to the Socrates offices, or your own home, and get cleaned up, and rest.”  
  
Harry nodded emphatically, just in case Macgeorge would look at him for a different opinion. “Call Rudie when you feel better,” he said. “I think she would feel the best for knowing that you’ve returned and that your magic hasn’t consumed you.”  
  
Macgeorge laughed at him. The sound was rasping like a bone used on iron, and made Draco narrow his eyes, Harry was glad to see. “Now you’re listening to what the Ministry says,” she whispered. “Necromancy does not  _consume._ Necromancy gifts, and frees, and teaches me how to see the world.”  
  
“And increases the chances that you’ll die of exposure and starvation,” Harry said, gesturing at her. “Then you can’t follow the truth anymore, except from the other side. Do you want to go there, so early in your life?”  
  
Macgeorge said nothing for some moments. Then she said, “I—I have studied necromancy more than anyone else has in years. It’s my gift. I think I can know what I can handle better than someone who’s never opened a book on the subject in my life.”  
  
“I have,” Harry said. He wondered for a second why Draco wasn’t speaking up, since he knew more about it, but then again, perhaps it was just as well to have Macgeorge distracted and her wrath spread out. “I did it for means of a case, and I never want to do it again. Maybe I don’t have the gift for it that you do, but even I can recognize when someone is on their last legs.” He stepped forwards and waved his wand, conjuring a mirror in his free hand.  
  
Macgeorge stared at her reflection. Her hand went once to her eyes, and then she dropped it and gave a large sniff that didn’t convince Harry at all that she wasn’t concerned. “You are not my partner.”  
  
“You shoved the last one you had away,” Harry said. “And you’ve exhausted yourself in pursuing our case, when you probably have your own waiting. I can thank you for your service, and tell you to go home and  _sleep_.”  
  
“Only think,” Draco intervened smoothly at that point, “you can do better, absorb more information and learn more truths, when you have rested. The human brain does not work well when one does not give it that time to rest.”  
  
Macgeorge paused once more. Then she nodded and said, “I will return home. But that does not mean that I’m giving up on the necromancy.” She glanced at Harry, eyes narrowed as if she really thought that he wanted her to give up. “You should think about whether you want to oppose me on this.”  
  
She Apparated. Harry stood there for a few seconds, shaking his head, and then turned to Draco. “Did I say something about wanting her to give up the necromancy that I don’t remember?” he demanded.  
  
Draco, damn it, was looking as though he wanted to laugh. He shrugged a moment later. “She is a pure-blood, and we’ve always been on better terms because of that. Perhaps that’s the reason she paid attention to my suggestion.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “What a load of bollocks. You’ve been insufferable around her ever since you discovered that she used to fancy me.”  
  
Draco seemed as if he would say something for a moment, and then sighed. “We should consider what we’re going to do, ourselves,” he said. “We’ve lost Bainbridge, and a widely-publicized trap—the nature of the publicity, at least, if not the nature of the trap—means that the Ministry is free to come down on us for wasting time and resources.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “They do that anyway. For now, let’s go back and start combing through the birth records.”   
  
“In the morning,” Draco said, with a glance at the stars and the moon that invited Harry to notice them too, and what time it was.  
  
Harry smiled at him. “Of course.” He held out his hand, and after a few seconds, as though waiting for some kind of trap, Draco took it.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke so suddenly that his heart jarred his chest. He lay there with his head turning from side to side, his body telling him that Harry still lay warm in the bed beside him, his hand finding his wand despite that.  
  
A chime. That was what it had been. A chime from Harry’s Floo. Draco rose quietly and left the bedroom. He was hoping it was Weasley, so that he would have a chance to ask her in private about what exactly those flowers were doing in her garden.  
  
He reached the Floo and activated it, but stood off to the side and cast a small glamour. Done properly, it would force the other person to ignore his presence, while also still feeling certain that someone was on the other side of the Floo for them to talk to. Draco considered it only a proper precaution, considering some of the people, like Weasleys, who might use Harry’s Floo and react badly to seeing him there.  
  
The fire flared, settled into a small, smoldering green ember, and Isla Rudie’s face appeared. She had her hands clutching something in front of her, which might have been a wand or might have been the back of a chair.  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes, starting to wonder how she knew Harry’s Floo address—was that the sort of information distributed at the induction of a new Auror into the Socrates Corps, and why had it not been given to them?—but Rudie’s words wiped that out of his brain.  
  
“I seem to owe you for telling Nicolette to firecall me,” Rudie snapped. “And I’m going to pay the debt back. The Ministry is hunting for your blood. Someone else saw that your trap failed. This is the Ministry’s excuse to witch-hunt you for a lot of the other things you’ve pissed them off for.” She paused, panting, and then added, “It’s going to be a lot worse than a scolding. I thought you should know, at least.”  
  
The Floo shut down, and Draco heard Harry’s sleepy call from inside the bedroom.   
  
But he wasn’t able to move to answer him for at least another minute, his shocked gaze locked on the flames.


	14. Ministry Chase

“We have to get out of here.”  
  
Draco had said the same thing three times now. Harry looked up at him in irritation from the floor, where he was busy trying to gather all the sensitive things that the Ministry might find in his house and declare Dark. Some of that included things as harmless as spoons that he had used to stir experimental potions. Hermione had warned him once that the Ministry technically classified most experiments as Dark, because it had no idea what they would do.  
  
“We do,” Harry snapped. “But they aren’t coming for us yet. That gives us some time to pack and run.”  
  
“How do you know that they aren’t on the way?” Draco spun round, glaring at him. His hair flew around him, and his face was so pale that Harry felt sorry for him. It couldn’t be easy to be told that the Ministry was bent on finding some way to drag you to Azkaban, when you had barely avoided that fate in the past.  
  
“I don’t,” Harry said calmly, standing up and casting the box he’d tucked those Dark objects into beneath the floorboard. When he cast another spell, it sealed the hole down, tucking Notice-Me-Not Charms into place over that single board. Let the Unspeakables or someone else come searching, and this part of the room would seem like the most uninteresting one ever invented. “But they aren’t here yet, and we can only react with what we already know.”  
  
Draco took a few gulping breaths and ran his hands through his hair. “Why are  _you_ so bloody calm?” he muttered.  
  
Harry shrugged. “Because I grew used to being told that I was an embarrassment and an encumbrance to the Ministry from an early age?” he offered. “Fudge didn’t like me, and neither did Scrimgeour. This is nothing new.”  
  
Draco sneered at him. “It has to be more than that.”  
  
 _Note for the future, don’t try to help him when he’s in this mood,_ Harry thought, and turned towards his bedroom, flicking his hand as he summoned the robes he wanted to wear if they did have to hide for a while—ordinary ones, not Auror robes—and the photographs he would always want to save, and his father’s Invisibility Cloak from beneath his bed. “Do you want to go to your place and get your things?” he asked over his shoulder.  
  
“They’ve probably surrounded it already.”  
  
Harry shrugged. He had only been to Draco’s place once or twice, and didn’t know how much sentimental value the objects there had to him. Or maybe he thought it was mostly objects that the Ministry wouldn’t disturb, like the portrait. He stuffed the robes and the photographs into the satchel that hung from his shoulder. “Then we should go—”  
  
There was a harsh sound from the front door, the lock hissing.  
  
Harry moved without thought, looping the Cloak over Draco’s head and pulling Draco against him the way he would with Ron or Hermione if they were hiding from enemies. Draco kicked and struggled and opened his mouth to explode.  
  
It was true that the Cloak wasn’t as convenient for two adults as it was for three children, but that couldn’t be helped. Draco seemed to get it after a few minutes and stopped struggling, although his breath was still coming fast. Harry wrapped his arms around Draco’s chest and held him still, bowing his head so that their hair mingled and he could breathe gently into Draco’s face. Draco shuddered once.   
  
The door scraped open.  
  
Harry peered through the starlight material of the Cloak and saw two Aurors step into the room. Well, they looked like Aurors, sort of. Harry wondered if it was the material of the Cloak that made their robes look ash-colored, instead of the scarlet that he would have expected.  
  
They moved like Aurors, anyway. He could say that much. They spread out and looked carefully from side to side, their hands on their wands, which they hadn’t drawn fully yet. The one on the left nodded to the one on the right and moved towards the kitchen. The one on the right began to move around the drawing room of the flat, his wand waving gently back and forth in front of him, as gently as a lion’s tail.  
  
Harry followed the circle that his pacing would take him on, mindful of the fact that he and Draco would need to move out of the way, and cursed when he realized that the man would walk past the mantle of his fireplace. The mantle where his journal sat out, shrouded in locks and locking spells but still a temptation. Already, the man’s head had lifted and Harry thought he could see interest firing his gaze.  
  
There were secrets in there that the Ministry could arrest him over, and never mind what they eventually decided about the Bainbridge case.  
  
Harry took a deep breath. He only knew one thing that would work in a situation like this, and while he didn’t think Draco would have any objections, there were qualms from his own conscience.  
  
He reminded himself that the Ministry could have handled this situation in any number of ways. They could have called him and Draco in and scolded them the way they would any other pair of Aurors who had failed. They could have assigned more Socrates Aurors to the case and put Harry and Draco under the observation of Warren and Jenkins, the two most senior Aurors in the Corps. Any number of things.  
  
They had chosen this way, instead.  
  
He touched Draco’s shoulder, and looked over his own. The second Auror had vanished into the bedroom. Well enough. Harry knew that he would have to confront them both, but there was no sense in hurrying the inevitable.  
  
“Stay here,” he mouthed, when he saw Draco looking at him. “I have to stop them.”  
  
And he moved in a way that flung the Cloak to the ground over Draco but kept him completely draped, stepping out into the open to hit the Auror reaching towards the mantle with a curse just as his hand descended on the book.  
  
The man jerked and cried out. Harry had enough time to make out that his beard was black, his eyes blue, and his robes, indeed, that odd ashen color that wasn’t Auror but wasn’t Unspeakable or Hit Wizard, either, before he whirled around and lifted his wand to aim at Harry. Harry smiled grimly into his eyes—the curse had been to stun and weaken the muscles, so that he couldn’t fire back quickly—and unleashed his only option.  
  
“ _Obliviate_ ,” he whispered.  
  
The man’s face changed again, sense and memory drifting away from him like clouds across a bright sky. Then Harry heard the sounds from behind him, and dropped smoothly to his knees, so that the hex aimed for his back went over him and hit the first intruder instead.  
  
His body jerked and began to change, flesh melting from the limbs like wax. Harry didn’t stay to watch more, but he turned around with his heart pounding and his conscience silenced. If  _that_ was the kind of magic they were empowered to use against him, then he felt not the least bit guilty about his Memory Charms.  
  
He  _Obliviated_ the second man as well, cast a quick  _Finite_  to stop the curse on the first man, and then scooped up his diary and tucked it away into the satchel hanging from his shoulder just as Draco tore his way out of the Cloak, scowling at him. Harry shook his head. “Not a word,” he said. “I should have packed this away from the beginning, yeah, but I didn’t, and this is what I had to do instead.” He turned around, positioned himself so that he was halfway between the two men, and said in a slow, clear voice, “Harry Potter isn’t here. He had already fled by the time that you came in.”  
  
The men nodded, still staring at him, entranced. Harry nodded smartly and held out his arm to Draco. “Time to go.”  
  
*  
  
Draco let Harry herd him out of his home, his mind quiet but brewing, in the way that Draught of Peace looked all flat on the surface; the real activity was beneath. Did Harry always use Memory Charms with that same facility?  
  
“You don’t need to worry that I would use them on you,” Harry murmured, as if he thought that was the reason Draco was keeping so silent as he followed him.  
  
Draco shook his head, but exhaled once, in a long, noiseless sigh. He eyed Harry. Harry was walking with his hips rolling, his head tossed back, his spine so straight that he would have made some of Draco’s Auror instructors salute.   
  
“That doesn’t bother me,” Draco said at last. “And you must know that I think using Memory Charms on our enemies only a matter of reality.”  
  
Harry glanced back at him with his eyebrows raised. “Then why do you look as though you swallowed an earwax-flavored Every Flavor Bean?”  
  
Draco scowled. He was sure that he looked better than that, more  _serious_ than that. “You can do that, and you can use Dark magic, and I’ve seen you kill in defense of me,” he said. “More than once. I know that you used Unforgivables during the war, too. Why can you do all that but not want to hunt down the twisted that you  _know_ are dangerous?”  
  
Harry’s parade pace faltered. He continued on his way looking more normal, his shoulders a little hunched and his head bowed against the wind. Draco followed him in silence still, but did come up beside him and brush his hand across Harry’s shoulder, so Harry would realize that he didn’t hate him.  
  
“I suppose,” Harry said at last, his voice muffled, “because I react to the danger that’s in front of me. But I hate the thought of the Obliviators, and how easy it is for them to destroy innocent Muggle minds, because a  _wizard_ was careless and said or did something in front of them. It’s—I don’t like general applications of principle, Draco.”  
  
Draco snorted. Nothing in the world could have made him hold it in, not if they were still in Harry’s drawing room with the not-quite-Aurors hunting them. “What are you trying to do with the twisted, but that?”  
  
Harry glared at him. “It’s to counter the Ministry’s abstract principle that says all twisted should be condemned. And you know very well that if you go by their description, then you wouldn’t even condemn all the twisted we’ve hunted, some of the ones who are missing those five descriptive traits that they supposedly have.”  
  
“What makes a twisted, as far as I’m concerned, is a flaw, insanity, and devotion to hurting us,” Draco said. “And if you don’t want to make those general applications of principle, then I’m more than willing to do it for you, Harry. We’ve  _talked_ about this. No making decisions that endanger our lives without talking to me first.”  
  
Harry gave a little motion as though pulling against a pair of reins. “Do you think what I did to those men endangered us?”  
  
“No,” Draco said, and slid his hand over Harry’s neck, down onto his shoulder. “I’m just trying to understand. You’re willing to run from the Ministry and use a Memory Charm on people like that, but you don’t want to hurt people trying to kill us?”  
  
Harry spent a moment looking a bit lost. Then he said, “I want to hurt people who are trying to hurt you. I know that I want to defend my own life. I know that you think sometimes I don’t, but I have something to live for since I met you, in a way that I otherwise didn’t since Lionel.” He stopped.  
  
Draco let the moment lengthen and stretch as they paused in front of the Apparition point. Harry turned to face him, and his hands rose and settled on Draco’s shoulders, his thumbs running back and forth as though he was trying to convince Draco and himself both at once. Draco laid his hands back on Harry’s and met his eyes, saying nothing. What Harry needed to say next, Draco thought he would need to say for himself.  
  
“But I also want to help people,” Harry whispered. “That’s why I can react when the twisted are trying to hunt you, or with these men, who were doing—whatever they were doing on behalf of the Ministry. It’s much harder to think about hurting people who  _might_ become enemies, and maybe not, depending on the way that they think and act.”  
  
Draco gave a single, fragile nod. “You didn’t recognize their robes, either.”  
  
Harry relaxed, and the smile he gave Draco was both brilliant and heartfelt. He was as relieved that they were dodging the questions as anything else, Draco thought, and for a moment discovered a deep weariness in himself. It just meant they had to address the questions later, as Harry would realize if he  _thought_ about it for once.  
  
But Draco had chosen to change the subject, so he would have to put up with the consequences if he didn’t like them.   
  
“No,” Harry said. He began walking again, and reached the Apparition point, drawing Draco snugly against him so that they both stood on it. Draco leaned his head against Harry’s shoulder and closed his eyes. Harry had held him like that under the Cloak, too. Strange to think he had a protector to rely on. “I thought they were Unspeakables at first, but their cloaks aren’t as dark as that.”  
  
“Another thing to think about and reason out,” Draco said.  
  
“You’ll do that,” Harry said simply. “You’re good at that.”  
  
Before Draco could open his mouth to object, the world faded around them into the blackness of Apparition. Draco clung to Harry’s body, the one solid and warm object in that cold darkness, and thought about whether he should demand that Harry drop his self-deprecation, too.  
  
 _Not now. Not yet._ He didn’t question where they were going, either. He leaned back and let Harry take charge.  
  
*  
  
Harry came out of the Apparition and glanced around. There was no one there—there was almost never anyone here, in this isolated street in the outskirts of Muggle London—but Harry had wanted to make sure. He sighed in relief and started tugging Draco along over dirty stones, wincing as he scraped on something. He really ought to get a decent pair of boots, or at least repair the one he had.  
  
“Where are we?” Draco lifted his head and frowned at the rows of close, dark flats around them, then stared at Harry. “I assumed we were going to a Weasley’s house or at least to your Black property.” He said nothing more than that, but instead gave another stare at the flats which communicated his feelings to Harry more clearly than words could have.  
  
“The Ministry knows about all those places,” Harry pointed out calmly, counting doors in front of them with taps of his boots. Fifth door down from the place he usually Apparated, right. The problem with using the thick wards he’d chosen was that they could blur even the recollections of the owner. “At least, if they don’t know about Grimmauld Place right now, they could check the records and discover I owned it.” He reached into the satchel and took out the thick iron key that had been concealed in the photograph album Hagrid had given him.   
  
“So, this place.” Draco stared at the door again, which was set with equally thick iron nails and made of a dark wood that Harry had never bothered to learn the name of. Draco’s silence settled over him, thicker still. Harry tried to chuckle as he slid the key into the lock, and the wards, on the verge of coiling to strike, felt him and dissipated, but it didn’t sound convincing.  
  
“It’s a secure place I created,” Harry said, and leaned against the door to make sure that it hit the wall instead of one of them. “To be safe from the Ministry, from my friends, from anyone who might come hunting me when I wanted to be alone.” He stepped in and flipped on the Muggle light, nodding when he heard the hum of appliances. It hadn’t been easy, at first, to convince the landlady to take money with no Muggle identity, but there was so  _much_ money. They’d come to an agreement.  
  
“Your friends?”  
  
Harry glanced back. Draco was leaning against the wall of the kitchen and staring at the refrigerator and the stove as if he had never seen things like that before.   
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “Sometimes I wanted to be alone, especially after Ron left for the joke shop, and that wasn’t something they always understood.” He turned around and opened the refrigerator. There was bread, mustard, some cheese, a little outdated but not by much. Kreacher did the shopping for this flat, under Harry’s strict orders. “Are you hungry?”  
  
“We never got a chance to eat breakfast, so yes.”  
  
Harry winced a little from the acidic tone in Draco’s voice, but kept right on taking things out and piling them up on the counter, avoiding the beer. Draco probably wouldn’t want it so early in the morning, and Harry couldn’t drink it without him. “All right, then,” he said with forced lightness. “I’ll toast some of the bread, and we can have—oh, I don’t know. How are you at conjuring butter?”  
  
Draco took a single step forwards. Harry turned around. It was surreal, seeing Draco in the middle of that cheap little kitchen with its lights that always seemed dim no matter how often Harry replaced them and the walls that were the color beige became when it died. Harry didn’t even think of this place often, let alone in the same breath as Draco.  
  
“I want you to tell me whether you have any  _other_ secrets waiting,” Draco said.  
  
Harry tried a smile out. It didn’t work. Harry sighed and plugged in the toaster, then dropped a few slices of toast into it. “None this big,” he admitted. “And I didn’t really keep this form you on purpose. I just don’t need to use it often, and since we became—real partners, I sort of forgot about it.”  
  
*  
  
 _A whole second home? You forgot about it?_  
  
Not that Draco couldn’t see, with the way it looked, why it wouldn’t be forgettable. Harry’s other home was much more comfortable. This one didn’t have more than one chair at the table, and the table had numerous scratches and cracks. Draco thought it probably didn’t have a fireplace hooked up to the Floo network, either. And house-elf service would be non-existent unless Harry called in his.  
  
But he had never once thought that Harry was capable of this sort of thing. It was the  _competence_ that Harry had been keeping secret more than anything else, the foresight about what the Ministry might do to him, the wariness.  
  
Draco had thought he would have to be the wary one for the both of them, and he didn’t mind that, much.  
  
Now he had to change things. And especially he had to change his conception of Harry, yet again.  
  
Harry was softly cursing the toaster. Draco stepped around him and made several small, neat motions of his wand. Two other pieces of bread lifted and started toasting, flipping over and over as they browned.  
  
Harry gaped at him, then shook his head. “I just don’t think about using magic when I’m here,” he muttered, and looked dubiously at the bread the machine had just popped up. “It seems easier to do things the Muggle way in Muggle surroundings.”  
  
Draco said nothing, but continued toasting the bread. Harry ran them glasses of water and didn’t take the beer out of the fridge, making Draco grateful that he hadn’t suggested they drink it. Draco didn’t think he could have refused gracefully right now.  
  
They sat down and crunched their way through their breakfast of, literally, bread and water. Harry said nothing. Draco found his mind going back to not only the men who had invaded Harry’s home that morning but to his own flat, the portrait of his Great-Aunt Gaia on the wall, the carpets he had chosen himself as soon as he could afford them, the bed that he sometimes slept in with Harry and sometimes sprawled in alone.  
  
Would the Ministry destroy all that? Or seize his property as evidence? He had thought they wouldn’t, but they might, if they were angry enough at their escape this morning, or found out what Harry had done with the Memory Charms.  
  
Draco closed his eyes, and shook his head. He had dedicated seven years of his life to the Aurors, in one way or another. He had chosen to walk away from his family to pursue this fucking career. He wasn’t going to back down now, and he wasn’t going to let the Ministry have it all their own way.  
  
“We can stay here as long as we need to,” Harry said, his words not so much scattering as accenting Draco’s thoughts. “Like I said, no one has any idea that this place is here. You can—I don’t know, write letters to anyone you think might be worried. I can write letters to my friends. And I can send Kreacher to get the  _Prophet._ I think we should know what the Ministry’s saying about us.”  
  
“Those are all good suggestions,” Draco said, and smiled in a way that made Harry lean away from him. “But why aren’t you suggesting contacting Rita Skeeter? Getting the news out there, making them  _pay attention_  to us?”  
  
“You want us to take the proactive part.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows. “Of course. Were you really planning to just hide here until the Ministry did something outrageous enough to push you into action?”  
  
Harry blushed and scratched the back of his neck. “I just don’t see what else I can do,” he admitted. “The Ministry has this long grudge against me. I think Okazes has been preparing for this day for a long time. We have to wait until the worst starts coming out because we don’t know what the worst  _is_ , what they can accuse me of, until they start saying it.”  
  
“You keep talking about yourself,” Draco said, and reached across the table. Despite looking as wary as though he expected a scorpion sting, Harry stretched out his hand, too, and Draco took it with a frenetically firm grip. “But you have a partner now, and I can think of better things to do than just sit here.”  
  
Harry blinked at him, and licked his lips. Draco restrained the immediate urge he had to bite them. “So. What’s your plan, then?”  
  
“We start moving before the Ministry can put anything coherent together on us, of course,” Draco said flatly. “We contact Skeeter. We contact your friends. We contact anyone in the Ministry who still owes us favors, or would be pleased to help us for future favors. We contact the other Socrates Aurors. We’re not  _giving up._ ”  
  
Harry bristled. “I didn’t  _plan_  to,” he began.  
  
“We did nothing wrong,” Draco continued fiercely. “We are famous and respected by at least some people. The thing to do now is show the Ministry that they can’t  _fuck_ with us. Bainbridge is still out there, waiting to be caught. And the blue-eyed twisted. The Ministry cares more about punishing us than catching them? Well, won’t that make an interesting story for someone like Skeeter.”  
  
Harry blinked, once, twice. Then he said, “I’m good at the conventional kind of battle. Not the political one.”  
  
Draco smiled, and felt fairly sure that the lights in the kitchen were gleaming off his incisors. “I am.”  
  
Harry took both his hands now. “I remember that when you’ve reminded me. That’s why it’s good to have a partner.”  
  
Draco gave him another, different kind of smile, and ripped to his feet. “Where do you keep your ink and parchment around here?”


	15. Two Kinds of Battle

“Oh my God, Harry. So you are all right.”  
  
Hermione’s voice was so hushed that Harry winced a little, and put out a hand to the fire as if that would make it better. Then he remembered that he wouldn’t be able to touch her anyway, and pulled it back and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I am. Somewhere safe, with Draco. What is the Ministry saying happened?”  
  
Hermione paused, and Harry could see her shuffling the truths in her head like volumes in the library that Bainbridge wanted to write. She would understand so much just from that simple statement that Harry felt braced and comforted already.  
  
A moment later, Hermione nodded and leaned forwards. “They’ve been saying that they just wanted to question you, but your home was empty and they can’t find you or Malfoy anywhere,” she said quietly. “They’ve been saying that you abandoned important files in plain sight, and that you’re increasingly unstable. Okazes is calling for your resignation, but if you won’t come in or at least send an owl, then, well, the orders are to arrest you on sight.” She paused. “Where  _are_ you?”  
  
Harry nodded again. Hermione was smart enough to realize that any secret place he wanted to use wouldn’t remain secret for very long if he added a Floo connection. The Floo network at least wanted an address. “I broke into someone else’s house and I’m using their Floo.”  
  
Hermione blinked at him. Then she said, “Oh.”  
  
Harry grinned at her. In the storm that was happening all around him, Hermione was  _also_ smart enough to realize that berating him for breaking into someone else’s house wasn’t the point. “I left Galleons on the table to pay for the broken wards,” Harry added. “And the broken window.”  
  
Hermione nodded back. “I think they’re going to bring out rumors of your insanity, too. There are those dark hints in the paper again that you’re mad just for speaking Parseltongue, and Skeeter is telling anyone who will listen that she predicted this years ago, when you were just a student at Hogwarts and she was writing stories about you.” She scowled. “I thought she would be on your side, given all the articles she’d written about you lately.”  
  
Harry snorted. “She’s on the side of a good story. Right now, that might seem like the best one.” Draco had contacted her, but they hadn’t heard back yet. Skeeter was probably weighing which version of the story would give her the most attention. “And have you—Hermione, have you heard from Ginny?”  
  
“Ginny’s in France, I thought,” Hermione said. “Gone to track down some old boyfriend of hers.”  
  
Harry relaxed all in a rush, to the point where he nearly dropped his forehead down to thunk on the wooden mantle. That was an innocuous explanation. She’d probably got worried about Michael Corner and felt she had to go. “Thank you,” he whispered. “What about Ron? How is he taking it?”  
  
“You’re innocent, the Ministry should shut up,” Hermione returned promptly. She shook her head. “You have something else you want to ask me about, Harry, and I can see it in your eyes. You might as well ask me.”  
  
Harry sighed. “Yes. What Department of the Ministry would employ wizards empowered to kill, and who wear ash-grey robes?”  
  
Even through the flames, he could see her face drain of color, and he sat up. “What?” he demanded.  
  
“Where did you see them?” Hermione whispered.  
  
Harry hesitated, but in the end, he couldn’t live with the conviction that Draco was his only friend in the world, even if he could manage to distrust some of his friends who were acting suspiciously, like Ginny. “In my house,” he said. “They were the ones who came armed and ready to use curses that melted flesh. What are they, Hermione?”  
  
Hermione shut her eyes. For a moment, her fingers moved in front of her as though tapping the keys of an invisible calculator. Then she opened them and said, “Not here. I don’t know—a few mentions of them should be safe enough, but they have the kind of spell that Voldemort used during the war, to alert them when enough people say their names or certain phrases. I’m sure that the color of their robes is one of those phrases. We need to meet somewhere and work out a secure code.”  
  
Harry did some more staring. Then he said, “How can  _you_  know how they are? I’ve worked for the Ministry in a Department that’s more secure.”  
  
Hermione nodded. Her face looked haggard. “I know, Harry, but—it’s—it’s not that simple. There are things that I investigated and found out about that I didn’t tell to you and Ron, because you needed to be idealistic about the Ministry to continue working there.”  
  
“You  _didn’t_?”  
  
Hermione met his eyes and smiled sadly. “No. I know I was the more idealistic one when we were younger, but I’ve accepted that the Ministry is flawed. It’s still better than a lot of the other structures for changing things, though.” Her face stilled. “But not  _them_.”  
  
Harry clenched his hands. “I’ll need to talk to Draco before I agree to meet you anywhere. He needs to know.”  
  
“Okay,” Hermione said patiently. “I’ll wait.” She paused. “But if the Ministry has sent them after you already, they won’t hesitate to do it again, especially if Malfoy starts spreading the word about them. Don’t wait too long.”  
  
“I won’t,” Harry said, and glanced over his shoulder. He thought he might have heard the front door opening, although he doubted it. Still, he shouldn’t stay  _here_ too long, either. “Give Ron my love, Hermione.”  
  
“Always,” Hermione whispered, and vanished.  
  
Harry cast a few spells that would keep anyone who studied the Floo connection from being able to know what the last address it had contacted was, and then turned and Apparated. The house’s broken wards gave a last forlorn twang behind him.   
  
*  
  
“Mr.  _Malfoy._ Or do you think that you still deserve the title of Auror, despite what the Ministry claims?”  
  
Draco smiled and leaned back in his chair in the dusty back room of the Hog’s Head, kicking his legs out in front of him. He had chosen dragonhide boots bought that morning under a glamour, and the best robes he owned that weren’t Auror robes. In the end, it had been child’s play to go back to his house once the Ministry assumed he was no longer there, slip past the warding spells, and slip out again with some of his best possessions. The Ministry had planned for wards that could slow down an Auror, not a Dark wizard. “Already beginning with the questions, Rita? I don’t even know that you’ve planned to tell my story yet.”  
  
Skeeter fussed with her hair for a moment, and Draco narrowed his eyes as he studied her.  _She hasn’t. She came to the meeting still undecided, and that means that I need to make the decision easier for her._  
  
“Well, that’s true,” Skeeter said, not meeting his eyes. “It’s just that there are so many  _different_ factors to choose from, this time, and whatever I choose to write about will influence my audience in the most  _intimate_ of ways.” She met his eyes and simpered at him. “I’m sure that you know what I mean, Auror Malfoy.”  
  
The title was a good sign. Draco was glad Harry hadn’t come with him, as he wouldn’t have thought so. “I know,” he said, and sighed so hard that he ruffled the tip of the feather on Skeeter’s quill as she drew it out of her bag. “Intimacy is the story of what I’ve been struggling against.”  
  
Skeeter paused one more time, and Draco watched amounts of money dazzle and flash behind her eyes. He didn’t mind, he found. It was good to be with someone he was able to understand in such a transparent way. Harry didn’t do things for motives of money or power, and thought he was simple because of it. In the world Draco had grown up in, he would have seemed an incredibly complicated person.  
  
“Then I want to hear that story, Auror Malfoy.” Skeeter leaned forwards. “What sort of intimacy? The sort that the Ministry is reporting you have with Mr. Potter?”  
  
Draco arched his eyebrows and smiled coolly. “Oh, no. This is the story of a struggle within the Ministry itself. A struggle between Departments, and the right to free control of information, and the way—” He paused, and drew the pause out, which left Skeeter staring at him in breathless anticipation.   
  
“Yes?” she whispered, swaying towards him.  
  
Draco barely kept from snapping his fingers in victory. He no longer had his parents’ money behind him, but he still had their training, and that meant he could seduce someone with little more than his breath.  
  
“The way that we get to define the future of the Chosen One,” Draco whispered, lowering his voice. “Whether that title is only a relic of the war, or whether it means  _something_ to other people, including those who would go out of their way to suppress it because they fear Harry’s power.”  
  
Skeeter was sitting upright, her eyes sparkling, probably because of the way he had referred to Harry as much as anything else. “Such a war,” she whispered, “would be of interest to the vast majority of my readers.”  
  
Draco winked at her. “That’s one reason that we decided that you should be the one to tell it to the world, Ms. Skeeter. Because we know that we can count on you to make it interesting, and reveal it in all its gorgeous,  _crawling_ detail.”  
  
Skeeter broke into a little rippling laugh, more generous and genuine than any of the laughter that Draco had heard her use in the past. “I like you, Auror Malfoy,” she declared, and poised the quill while Draco was still blinking in shock. “Now. To the story!”  
  
And Draco, after a moment more to bob in the sea of surprise, recovered, and gave her what he and Harry had decided on.  
  
*  
  
“Hermione says that we shouldn’t reveal anything about them.”  
  
Draco made a humming noise and drank some more tea, staring so hard at the wall of Harry’s kitchen that Harry turned his head in spite of himself. But no, the wall was still that dirty, ordinary beige color. He shrugged and faced Draco again. “Well?”  
  
“Granger may well be right that they have a spell that allows them to detect mentions of themselves,” Draco mused. “But that only means  _we_ shall have to work out a way to talk about them.”  
  
Harry paused. That didn’t sound so bad, when from Draco’s expression, he had imagined that he was about to light some kind of fuse. “Yes, that’s what Hermione meant,” he said cautiously. “You didn’t say anything about them to Skeeter, did you?”  
  
Draco shook his head and looked at him. “Not because I’m paranoid, but because I thought she might be, and refuse to release any information about them without some kind of proper assurance that they won’t target her next.”  
  
“I don’t think Hermione’s being paranoid.”  
  
Draco swung his boots to the floor and leaned across the table to take Harry’s hand. Harry watched him narrowly. Ever since he had come back from his interview with Skeeter, Draco had sparkled with a strange energy. He stroked Harry’s hand now as if it was a way to persuade him of something.  
  
Harry didn’t trust Hermione’s instincts  _more_ than Draco’s. But what she had said made sense to him, and so did delaying whatever response Draco wanted to make to the grey-cloaked wizards until they had heard what Hermione had to say.  
  
“She might not be,” Draco whispered, and gave a quick kiss to the back of Harry’s hand. “But until we know what she knows, then we can’t know that.”  
  
Harry untangled that for a few desperate seconds, then nodded. “That’s the only thing I’ve been trying to get you to agree on,” he said. “That we’ll arrange a face-to-face meeting with her, somewhere safe, and learn what she  _does_ know.”  
  
Draco gave him a dazzling smile. “And lose ground in the meantime? Wait for our enemies to find us and strike again, or react to Skeeter’s article and become desperate enough to employ more Ministry resources in hunting us down? No.”  
  
“We put the article out there,” Harry said. “We gave Hermione some news she can work with. We  _have_ to sit back and await results. That’s what you said, why you wanted to do something like this first.” He wondered how the fuck it had happened that  _he_ was the one pleading caution and restraint, and Draco was the one who talked like he was tap-dancing on a volcano. “We have no choice.”  
  
“We’ll wait for the article to become public and some kind of reaction to happen,” Draco said, his fingers rubbing Harry’s wrist so firmly now that Harry didn’t think he could pull his hand away. “As far as the world outside this house knows, that’s all we’ll be doing.”  
  
Harry watched him again. Draco’s face was still distant and dazzled, gazing on some other world. “And we’ll talk to Hermione,” Harry added cautiously.  
  
“Of course, talk to Hermione,” Draco echoed.  
  
Harry leaned forwards and tapped Draco’s cheek, hard. Draco started and looked at him, and Harry shook his head. “Now I  _know_ you aren’t paying attention,” he said. “Because you called Hermione by her first name. What’s going on in your head that you can’t share with me?”  
  
He did snap his mouth shut after those words, because it had occurred to him that this might be the way Draco had felt all the times that Harry had some secret plan—to break out of hospital or take on Nancy Morningstar by himself—but hadn’t wanted to share it. Still, he agreed with Draco now that that hadn’t been a good tactic for anything but getting himself killed, and he believed the same thing about Draco’s silence. He sat there, staring, daring him not to answer.  
  
*  
  
Draco wondered if he could share the deep, thick, starlight kind of will moving inside him. He didn’t want to scare Harry off, but equally, he didn’t know if he had the right words for this.  
  
 _If you don’t have the right words, then you can’t convince Harry._  
  
Draco nodded as he thought about it. Yes, that was true. And it meant that he would go without Harry’s help, or at best with him trailing Draco around, trusting him but hating it.  
  
“There are ways,” he murmured, taking Harry’s hands, “that we could confront a few of the people hunting us without alerting them to the fact. Especially your knowledge of the Ministry and your skill with the Memory Charm.”  
  
Harry’s eyes were cautious so fast that Draco blinked. He had grown used to the lack of that look in a remarkably short time. Perhaps it was only natural for Harry to distrust, though, when he had so few months of Draco being his partner instead of his opponent half the time.  
  
“More knowledge isn’t worth the risk we would take by breaking into the Ministry and confronting Okazes,” Harry said quietly. “Besides, with the article, we would have them looking for us in a way that they weren’t before it came out.”  
  
Draco only smiled back, delighted that Harry had grasped his plan so quickly, and stroked his palms, turning his hands over. “That’s true, but if we go now, before the article comes out? And if that isn’t the only tack we take? I admit, I’m curious about the Ministry’s reasons, how much of this is due to a long grudge against you and how much is embarrassment. They could have kept the failure of the Bainbridge case quiet. Why admit it?”  
  
“The grudge against me, I’d assume.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows. “And that’s worth making themselves look foolish, when they were the ones who gave us permission to try that trap in the first place?” He stroked Harry’s hand again, and Harry looked thoughtfully at him. “No, this runs deeper. And I don’t think it means that they want to discredit the Socrates Corps, either, because they have the power to disband it if they wanted to.”  
  
“Then there would be no one to hunt the twisted,” Harry said.  
  
Draco nodded. “This is connected somehow. The grudge against you, the Bainbridge case and why they aren’t more interested in scolding us for wasting resources, why they sent those wizards after us in your home. I want to know, and the only way we can find out is by asking the people who set this up.”  
  
Harry spent a few minutes looking at him, as if trying to uncover hidden motives. Draco looked back and tried to radiate sincerity, something he’d never had much practice at. But this really was all he had wanted, to convince Harry to try going to the Ministry, questioning Okazes and others, and then using Memory Charms to make them forget that Harry and Draco had done so.  
  
Harry finally said, “I want you to agree to something in return.”  
  
“Delighted,” Draco said, and played with Harry’s fingers for a moment. “I think. No, I am,” he added, when Harry squinted at him. “I can think of many things you’ve done for me, and fewer that I’ve done for you.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “You were the one who made me live again. There’s nothing I can do that would repay that.”  
  
Draco disagreed, but silently, in the confines of his head, where Harry couldn’t hear about it and possibly say something tiresome. He tilted his head to the side in the meantime and quietly raised his eyebrows.   
  
“I want to set a trap,” Harry said. “A real one, one that would draw Bainbridge in. And possibly also make the blue-eyed twisted notice us enough to pull  _him_  in.”  
  
Draco snorted. “And you think that my plan to enter the Ministry is too risky? I’d remind you that we don’t have any way to hold Blue Eyes yet. No way to make him stay if he wants to leave, and no stray victim for him to possess.”  
  
“That’s something we can work on,” Harry said, with the steel in his voice that Draco had only heard before when they were arguing before about how dangerous some of the twisted were. “But I want to do this. We started the case; let’s give the best retort we can to the Ministry’s accusations of incompetence by showing that we can finish it, too. And if we can take Blue Eyes down at the same time, we won’t have to worry about him anymore.”  
  
Draco cocked his head in interest. “All right. I’ll concede that it  _would_ be a good idea to get rid of both of them at once.” He waited, then added, “Do you have any idea how we’d do that? Just to give me a lead, you understand.”  
  
Harry smiled, and Draco discovered that there was still a corresponding rush through his blood to his groin when that happened, Bainbridge and the irritation of what the Ministry was doing to them and all.  
  
“I have one.”  
  
*  
  
Harry lifted his head and sniffed. He heard Draco draw in his breath behind him, doubtless about to say that Harry couldn’t  _literally_ smell out danger, but he didn’t say it. He was probably as cautious as Harry about making too much noise.   
  
Harry nodded. “It’s clear.”  
  
They had entered the Ministry by means of a small side door that Aurors usually used when arresting someone, like a Wizengamot member, who would make headlines if brought in through the Floo. It had been guarded, of course, but Harry had  _Obliviated_ the two Aurors there, and now they were happily at home, convinced that someone had come and told them they had a temporary holiday.  
  
“It’s almost scary how good you are at that,” Draco murmured, following him. Harry knew he didn’t mean sniffing out danger.  
  
Harry shrugged at nothing. “I learned the basics of it during Auror training. I got good at it when I was partnered with Ron.”  
  
Draco was staring at his back as they moved through the corridors, quieter but not absolutely silent with the approach of evening. “Did you and Weasley have a lot of cases that needed it?”  
  
“We had a lot of cases that led back to the Wizengamot and other people who might not have let us live if they knew we were hunting them,” Harry said shortly. He still thought it was the pressure of those cases, and the politics in general, that had made Ron quit the Aurors. And he still felt a fierce ache when he thought about it. He couldn’t blame Ron, but they hadn’t been as close since then.  
  
Draco took a quick step, and Harry started to turn around with his wand lifted, thinking Draco had sensed some danger. Instead, Draco leaned close to Harry and sniffed himself, as if he wanted to inhale his scent.  
  
“Listen,” Draco whispered. “I won’t say that I’m sorry, because that skill is saving our arses now.” He tightened his hold on Harry’s arm, so hard that Harry doubted he could have withdrawn if he’d tried. “And I won’t say I’m sorry that Weasley left you, because that left the way open for me to become your partner.”  
  
“You won’t say you’re sorry for things that you have no reason to be sorry for, in other words,” Harry pointed out, and squeezed Draco’s arm. “I know. Let’s go. Okazes usually stays late, but there’s no reason for him to linger too long.” They had discussed sending a message to Okazes hinting that the writer knew something about Potter and Malfoy and he should remain in his office that afternoon for a private interview, but had dismissed the plan as too risky.  
  
Draco nodded and followed him in silence. Harry paused in front of Okazes’s office door and sent a quick, testing probe charm in, one too light for the wards to detect. He sighed with relief when the probe told him that Okazes was sitting at his desk, alone.  
  
He nodded to Draco. Draco nodded back, and they burst through the door.  
  
Draco cast the Silencing Charms, Harry the binding ones. Okazes was sitting in his chair with the ropes wrapped around him and the door was locked and warded even more powerfully before Okazes finished opening his mouth to shout.  
  
Harry shook a little as he reached back and gripped Draco’s hand. It was the fastest they had ever acted together. Draco nodded to him, clasped his fingers, and then leaned back against the wall and proceeded to look bored. It was the plan they had agreed on.  
  
Harry smiled at Okazes. “I think we should have a conversation, don’t you?”


	16. Much-Wanted Answers

“You have not the slightest idea what you’ve cost the Ministry.”  
  
Harry blinked, and stepped back despite himself, when Okazes spoke those words. He had assumed without thinking that the Deputy Head Auror wouldn’t give them anything until they started threatening him. But Okazes’s mouth was definitely moving, and there was a rage and bitterness in his eyes that Harry hadn’t seen even when the blue-eyed twisted was possessing him.  
  
“In terms of time and money,” Okazes continued whispering. “In terms of difficulty of labor. A certain Auror might go too far and cause problems with the public. We know that. We’re prepared for that. But we’ve  _never_ had someone cause as many problems as you have.”  
  
There didn’t seem to be an answer for that. Harry swallowed, and found that air and what felt like blood were sticking in his throat. He fell back another step, and hit a solid body behind him. Draco put an arm around his shoulders that felt like it would have done as much good wrapped around his throat, and smiled at Okazes.  
  
“That doesn’t give you the right to harass him,” he said pleasantly. “That doesn’t give you the right to assign him to a Corps with a brand-new partner where the high death rate probably persuaded you that he would die soon, too. That doesn’t give you the right to endorse the  _ridiculous_ ban that St. Mungo’s gave him. What sort of Healers refuse to help a man who might bleed to death without them? And the Ministry went along with it.”  
  
There was silence, from Draco because he seemingly had no more to say at the moment, and from Okazes because it looked like he was speechless from rage, and from Harry because he was looking sidelong at Draco. He had had no idea that his ban from being treated at St. Mungo’s had upset Draco so much. He had certainly given no indication of it before.  
  
 _Or, at least, not in those words,_ Harry amended, remembering some of the things Draco had hinted at when they were working with the Mind-Healers in the pay of the Ministry, the only ones who would reliably treat Harry.  
  
“You have no idea what he’s cost us,” Okazes whispered again, in what sounded like a daze of wrath.  
  
“Then why don’t you tell us?” Draco cocked his head to the side and gave Okazes almost a winsome smile. “This is your chance. We’re a captive audience—if you’ll excuse the pun where it applies to you—and Harry was never in the right mood to listen to you before. But now, he  _wants_ to know.” Draco’s voice almost vanished as he whispered, his hand clenching low on Harry’s back as he leaned forwards. Harry was willing to bet money that the hand would be white-knuckled, and also that Draco would keep it carefully out of Okazes’s vision so he couldn’t see it. “Harry would never listen before. He’ll listen now.”  
  
 _That won’t tempt him,_ Harry thought, eyeing Okazes and the way that he still flexed his hands in his bonds as if that alone would break the  _Incarcerous_ ropes.  _It can’t, not really._  
  
But it seemed that either Draco had spoken better than Harry thought he had or Okazes really thought he had nothing to lose, because he nodded curtly and creaked his head around to face Harry. “You,” he whispered. “It’s always bloody  _you_.”  
  
Harry didn’t move. The best thing he could do to provoke Okazes, he had discovered long ago, was to act as if none of his criticisms mattered. And sure enough, Okazes pounded on as usual, trying to discover something that  _would_ break and alter and change Harry.  
  
“You’re always the center of public attention, and public inquiry,” Okazes continued, voice scoring Harry like some of the acids he had used in Potions class. “Whenever an Auror gets injured, we get owls asking if it’s you. And whenever you do something that ends up on the front page of the  _Prophet,_ we have to spend hours doing interviews about it. Then you go and do something frankly  _mad,_ like your actions in the Gina Hendricks case.”  
  
“So you’re…” Harry let his voice trail off. He couldn’t believe that he had been about to suggest that Okazes was jealous, but God, that was what it sounded like.  
  
“You’re one Auror,” Okazes said, and his voice had dropped and dripped into a bitter, bitter whisper. Yes, Harry could use it as acid to remove his beard stubble if he wanted. “ _One_ Auror. We don’t have the resources to give everyone your level of attention, and we don’t have the resources to do everything that the public insists we do for you. Yet if we don’t, there’s always someone ready to trumpet that we don’t value the Boy-Who-Lived enough. And then there’s the work that you create when you take a risk on a case and end up concussed or cursed or nearly dead.”  
  
“That’s only happened once since he was partnered with me,” Draco said, his arm tightening around Harry’s shoulders. “And that was the time he went to St. Mungo’s before he was banned. The rest of the time, we took care of it ourselves.”  
  
Okazes turned his head to Draco. “Why couldn’t you do what you were supposed to do?” he whispered.  
  
“What I was supposed to do.”  
  
Draco didn’t say that as a question. Harry reached up and took his arm, this time, for support, and moved forwards so that he would be able to block the motion of Draco’s wand. He didn’t really want to think about what that particular tone meant for Okazes.  
  
“Yes,” Okazes said, and although his face had turned pale and he was squirming in his bonds again as if he could break them, he wouldn’t turn back now. “You were  _supposed_ to drag him down, make him sane, act as an anchor on him. If you had questioned him more often instead of working with him as a partner, then our administrative load would have lessened, and he would have stood more chance of annoying you instead.”  
  
Draco said nothing. But it was the sort of saying nothing that, again, Harry knew, and he pressed close to Draco, resting a hand on his arm, murmuring back to him, talking to him, letting him know that Harry didn’t believe Okazes’s words, and that he would never have expected Draco to do such a thing.  
  
Because he had seen that look on Draco’s face only right before Draco engaged in Dark Arts, and he didn’t want to see Draco unleash them here.  
  
*  
 _They intended me to be that._  
  
It hardly mattered that Draco would never have been that, partially because he didn’t want to be but more because he had always wanted to work with his partners instead of drag them down. When he had found out he was partnered to Harry bloody Potter, he hadn’t liked it, but he had never once thought of sabotaging their cases or arranging matters so that Harry would get less credit than he did.  
  
No, it was that Okazes and his cabal had not accepted Draco at face value as a good Auror. Instead, they had wanted him to be their little pet, their obedient servant, doing the tasks they assigned him, playing the role that they wanted him to play.  
  
Just like his parents. Just like the Lucius and Narcissa who had wanted a compliant little Malfoy heir instead of a son. It didn’t matter that Draco had proven them wrong, in the end, about how compliant he  _really_ was. They still had seen him that way, had tried to pry and prod and manipulate him into being that.  
  
And the Ministry had been his shield against them, the Auror career a bid for freedom from their games. He had never trusted the Ministry, but he knew how to operate there, knew the games of favors and intimidation, and had never doubted that most people saw him as a formidable player.  
  
Now he learned that Okazes—and whatever  _others_ had thought he would act as a chain on Harry—hadn’t seen him that way at all.   
  
Just another puppetmaster.  
  
Draco’s hand clenched on his wand until he had to forcibly use the image of it being broken in two pieces to drive himself back. He pulled away with a little whistling cry and shook his head when Harry leaned in and whispered into his ear, “We can leave, if you want. You don’t need to stay here and endure this.”  
  
No. As much as he loved Harry for sensing what he was feeling and caring enough to want to intervene—caring more for Draco’s comfort than for what they could learn from Okazes—he wasn’t leaving without more answers.  
  
“Give me names,” he told Okazes. “Give me the names of the people who thought that assigning me to Harry was a way to chain both of us.”  
  
Okazes looked carefully at him. Then he said, “They did not intend to chain you, Auror Malfoy. You have nothing like Auror  _Potter’s_ record of bad and foolish decisions. You were the convenient tool, not someone we hated.”  
  
Draco smiled. That was worse, that they had seen him only in terms of his effect on Harry, not as someone independent and worth dealing with in his own right. That made his heart pound all the harder and his mouth flood with saliva that he had no intention of wasting on Okazes’s face. That made his hand rest the harder on his wand, until Harry took his fingers and pried them open one by one.  
  
Draco could have been angry about that on another day, because they were showing weakness in front of an enemy, but he was the one who had made the prying necessary, and he was also the one who intended to search Okazes’s mind after they  _Obliviated_ him to make sure every trace of this conversation was gone, so it didn’t matter.  
  
“I was used,” he said calmly. “And someone decided that our partnership was a way for me to be used. Who was it?”  
  
Okazes shook his head. “You’re making this sound like some deliberate effort to enslave you, and it was anything but that. You should be flattered by the attention of so many powerful wizards who thought that you could be useful.”  
  
“Flattered,” Draco whispered.  
  
Harry was in front of him, standing there with his hands flat on Draco’s chest. He didn’t shove. He didn’t need to. His eyes said it for him.  
  
“I won’t hurt him more than we already planned on,” Draco said sweetly to him, and watched Harry tighten his shoulders and bow his head. “Don’t worry, Harry. Not at all. But I want to know the answers to this, and Okazes hasn’t shown me that he doesn’t know the answers. He’s just trying to dissuade me from asking for them.” He turned and aimed his wand at Okazes, straight between the ropes at his gut, where a wound would hurt the most and take a long time to kill him. “You can’t. Tell me, now.”  
  
“I should have known this wouldn’t work,” Okazes whispered. “I told him that Potter had a record of influencing his partners badly. Hale, who could work with anyone, refused to work with  _him_. And Lionel Vane was never the Auror he used to be after he had worked with Potter for a month.”  
  
Harry flinched beside him, but at least Draco knew that Okazes wouldn’t realize the deeper reason for that. He was the only one, besides perhaps Mind-Healer Estillo, who knew of Harry’s failed crush on Vane, and the way that Vane had carefully distanced himself from Harry after Harry had told him.   
  
Still, that the words hurt Harry was enough. Draco nodded a little and whispered, “ _Contactus_.”  
  
Okazes flinched, and screamed. Draco shook his head, smiling. “Come,” he said, as he nonverbally conjured a flame on the end of his wand. “I haven’t even  _hurt_ that part of my body joined to yours yet, let alone done something to make you sound like that.”  
  
“Draco,” Harry said quietly.  
  
Draco turned and looked at him. “What?” he asked. “Why can’t I? Because it’s Dark magic?” He held the wand closer to his left hand. Okazes watched the flame the way a moth would, a way that told Draco he knew perfectly well what the spell did. Draco smiled. So much for Dark magic not being practiced in the offices of the Ministry’s higher echelons.  
  
Harry’s hand closed gently around his wrist. He didn’t jerk, he didn’t even restrain, he simply held. Draco sneered at him, too, but Harry looked into his eyes and didn’t look away.  
  
That was what made Draco listen, in the end. Before Harry, so many other people had looked away, leaned away. He had got along well enough with Kellen Moonborn, his last partner, but even there, it had been a business affair, no deep bond like the one he had with Harry. Kellen simply hadn’t been interested enough in him.  
  
“You don’t need to torture him like this, because you’re not the kind of person who needs to torture,” Harry told him, soft and simple and sane. “You’re not  _his_ kind of person. Not the kind that set you on me intending you to make me fail, either. This is something they want. Fine. They can have it. They can practice the pain spells and whatever that one is.” He nodded to the flame burning on Draco’s wand. “But you don’t have to. You’re better than that.”  
  
“I think we’ve established by now,” Draco whispered, barely moving his lips, “that I don’t think everyone who avoids using Dark Arts is a good person.”  
  
“I know that.” Harry’s eyes were so bright and so somber, and they never moved. “But torture…that’s something different again, Draco. What will the spell do if I let you go ahead and put that flame to your hand?”  
  
“Give him the pain I would be feeling otherwise,” Draco said, turning back to Okazes and smiling. Okazes flinched and cowered in his ropes. Draco hissed disdain and defiance. Yes, he thought someone could use the Dark Arts and not be corrupted instantly the way the Ministry believed they would be, but on the other hand, one had to have the courage to bear the consequences. Someone who couldn’t stand the thought of pain had no business wielding magic that powerful.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, as incisive as though he was refuting another argument about the morality of hunting twisted down. “There’s no need for you to do something like this, Draco. I mean it,” he added, when Draco turned his head and sneered at him again. “Not because it’s Dark Arts. Because it’s torture, and I think you’ve had enough of that and more.”  
  
“You heard what he said,” Draco murmured. “That it was  _deliberate._ That they didn’t just plan for us to clash, that they planned for me to destroy you.”  
  
“And they didn’t succeed.” Harry reached out and placed his hand in front of the flame this time, making Draco jerk the wand back instinctively. Harry didn’t have the Joined Contact spell on him, but the fire was real, and it could still burn him. “That’s the hell of it, Draco. What they wanted to do to me was horrible, but really no surprise. What they wanted to do to  _you_ is worse. They wanted to make you into a tool.”  
  
Draco tilted his head to the side, but didn’t turn completely away. It was what he had thought a few minutes ago, comparing the Ministry officials and his parents in his mind. His only wonder was how Harry had divined it.  
  
Harry’s hand rose and smoothed along the side of Draco’s throat, touching a muscle here, the pulse there. “You shouldn’t do what they want. You’re  _you_ , and you have an independence and a mind of your own. They shouldn’t leash you.”  
  
Draco glanced back and forth from Okazes to the flame on his wand, and then snorted. “And you think that what I’m about to do is something they  _want_ me to do?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “Not so much that. But you’re doing it because of them. Rebelling against someone doesn’t really work, not if the only reason for the act of defiance is to rebel. Think about your parents and your decision to become an Auror. You did it for _yourself,_ not because you wanted to spite them. They cut you off because of your decision, but you didn’t know that would happen.”  
  
Draco reached out and stroked back Harry’s fringe, baring his scar. Part of him felt silly and strange doing this in front of Okazes, but he was going to lose the memory anyway. They might as well be alone. “I think that you think of your own nobility as inherent in everyone else. And that you’re being a bit of a hypocrite.”  
  
Harry smiled, but said, “We aren’t talking about me right now. We’re talking about you, and the fact that you don’t have to do this.”  
  
Draco looked back at Okazes again. He was staring at Harry as if he’d never seen him before.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said softly, in answer to both Harry’s words and that stare, as he flicked his wand and dismissed the flame. “Don’t you wonder why in the world you didn’t see him as he really was, someone who would protect even people who tried specifically to destroy him? How did you miss it?”  
  
Okazes looked back at Draco, and his face flushed. “It doesn’t matter what he would do in a situation like this,” he said. “The question is whether he would continue costing the Ministry resources if we let him continue unchecked. And the answer is yes.”  
  
Draco shrugged, not showing on his face the confusion churning in his gut. If the Ministry felt this way about Harry, and so little about Draco that they could sacrifice any usefulness he might have to make him into an anchor, and if they had cast them both into the Socrates Corps to let their drama play out…  
  
Then the Ministry didn’t seem to care as much about the twisted being hunted and caught as Draco had assumed they did. And that meant things for Harry’s argument about the morality of hunting them that Draco didn’t want to think about.  
  
 _Well, luckily I don’t need to think about them right now._ Draco swished the notion away and said, “I believe that you were about to tell us other things. Such as who the wizards were that came hunting us.”  
  
Okazes shook his head. “I can’t name them,” he said, and something about the word  _can’t_ made Draco cock his head. “Besides, I wasn’t the one who made that decision, just like I wasn’t the one who made the decision to partner you. That comes from higher up,” he added, with venom in his voice that Draco had to admit would have been fun to see him unleash against proper targets. “Those who command the Shadowborn—”  
  
He stopped, and his throat worked for a moment. Harry glided up to Draco’s side and cast while Draco was still trying to decide what was going on and what he wanted to do next. Okazes sagged over to the side, his breath coming fast and shallow, bruises darkening into place around his neck that looked like the marks of strangling fingers.  
  
Draco looked at Harry. Harry sighed. “I recognized the spell,” he said. “There _are_ spells that will literally stop someone from speaking the truth, not letting their lips form the words—”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “There’s more than one student of Dark Arts in this room, you realize.”  
  
“Sorry, oh great student,” Harry said, and grinned at him, startling Draco with the suddenness of the gesture. “I thought you’d prefer to be called a master.”  
  
There was nothing to say to that, just like there was nothing to say to ten percent of Harry’s mad comments. Draco leaned back and gestured for Harry to go ahead.  
  
“And there are spells that act more like the Unbreakable Vows, and simply punish you if you break the prohibition,” Harry continued smoothly. “I stopped one of that kind from killing him just now. Okazes seemed to think he was under one of the first kind of spells, but it was this kind instead.” He looked at Okazes, and cocked his head. “Of course, if he was lying about not knowing the name of those grey wizards, he might have been lying about lots of other things.”  
  
Draco shrugged. “We always knew that he was a limited source of information. There are some things the spells won’t let him say, and other things he might not know, and other things that even the threat of torture won’t make him give up.” He glanced at Harry pointedly and raised his eyebrows.  
  
“All the more reason not to use the threat of torture.”  
  
 _Another argument that we probably can’t settle._ Draco restrained the temptation to snap, and said instead, “All right. We have a name.” He didn’t care to say it again, in case there was a tracking charm that would lead the Shadowborn straight to them, but said, “Have you heard of them before?”  
  
Harry hesitated.  
  
“Well?” Draco demanded. He glanced back at Okazes and cast a  _Renervate_  at him. Okazes jerked, and his breathing deepened, but he didn’t wake up yet. At least Harry’s spell meant his tongue would still be free to move. “Have you, or haven’t you?”  
  
“Not under that name,” Harry said at last. “There was something I heard on the—the Gina Hendricks case that I think now might have referred to them. I’ll have to think about it. Try putting the memory in a Pensieve, maybe.”  
  
Draco nodded his acceptance of that, and then knelt down in front of Okazes. Maybe he couldn’t torture him, but Harry hadn’t said that he couldn’t threaten him in other ways.  
  
“Wake  _up_ ,” he whispered, using a nonverbal charm to give Okazes the sensation of a hand slapping his cheek. Okazes started and sat up, his eyes wide with something like terror.   
  
“Now,” Draco said calmly into his face. “I don’t believe that you know nothing. You’ve just proven that you don’t even know your own  _mind,_ if you thought you were under a spell that prevented you from speaking the truth about those wizards who attacked us, and it turns out that you aren’t. I want a name. Who suggested that I be partnered with Harry? Who thought I would drag him down?”  
  
Okazes closed his eyes and opened them. “You aren’t going to let me live,” he whispered.  
  
“Of course we are,” Draco said. “We have our own means of making sure that you don’t tell anyone the truth.” He nodded to Harry, who stepped up to the side, with his wand at the ready.   
  
Okazes didn’t look at Harry, simply continued to stare at him. Draco brought his mouth close to the fool’s ear. “Harry prevented me from doing what I wanted to once,” he whispered. “It doesn’t mean he’ll always be here, or always want to watch out for you, particularly if you continue to block us from the truth.” He touched his wand to Okazes’s throat, his ear, his forehead, light, glancing touches. “Just imagine what I can do then.”  
  
Okazes shivered, but either he had been shaken by his own revelation that he might die from a careless word, or Draco frightened him more than his superiors did. He whispered the breathless reply.  
  
“Head Auror Ernhardt.” 


	17. Enemies Within and Without

“We shouldn’t be here.”  
  
Draco nodded in response to Harry’s words, but didn’t stop his digging through the official files in Ernhardt’s desk. “This is the best chance we’ll have, and even though I don’t doubt your Memory Charm skills, someone else might still find out that a spell mucked with Okazes’s mind,” he said, not looking up. “They won’t know what he told us, but they’ll increase their locking charms.”  
  
Harry stepped forwards and put a hand on Draco’s left forearm. He deliberately let his hand rest where he knew the Dark Mark would be. It wasn’t something he’d done before, although he hadn’t flinched from the Mark when he and Draco were in bed together.   
  
It worked. Draco turned to him and stared him in the eye.  
  
“Why are you so upset about this?” Harry asked him quietly, and then shook his head when Draco opened his mouth. “I don’t mean finding out that we have enemies. I’m upset about that, too. But why are you taking risks like this? Ernhardt isn’t a loving, caring boss. He barely speaks to us. Why are you taking his betrayal so personally?”  
  
Draco’s hands were on his chest now, pushing more than a little ungently, shoving Harry back until he swayed on his feet. “Because I dedicated my bloody life to this Ministry, and  _this_ is the way they value us,” he hissed.  
  
Harry relaxed a little, nodding. “I can see that. You made the decision to give up your family for them, and they didn’t take you seriously.” He ran both his hands up and down Draco’s left arm now, trying to soothe the bunched muscles. “But if you’re irritated mostly for me, you don’t need to be. I’m used to what they think of me, how they try to use me.”  
  
Draco leaned forwards, to the point that Harry thought Draco was going to nuzzle his neck or something. Instead, Draco whispered into his ear, “I’m not. And I don’t think that  _you_ should ever have grown used to it, either.” He move Harry’s shirt aside, viciously kissed Harry’s shoulder, and then bit him hard enough to make Harry reel and almost have to sit down.  
  
“Fucker,” Harry said, when he could talk again. “Fine, we’ll talk about this later. And we are  _not_ doing this in the middle of the Ministry offices,” he added, when he felt Draco’s hand slipping lower, aiming for his groin. “You got your way, now we’re going to have mine. You said that you had a plan to find out from Okazes why they wanted to hunt us, and we did,” he clarified, when Draco just stared at him. “And I said that I had a way to solve our other problems. So come on.”  
  
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” Draco’s hand hovered above the erection that had sprung out of nowhere, at least for Harry. Harry shook his head, wondering why that had happened.  
  
But he knew the answer. He could always get it up for Draco. A little humiliating, perhaps, but perfectly true. And he would have to be the one to make the decision if he didn’t want to come in the middle of Ernhardt’s office, because Draco didn’t seem capable of making it right now.  
  
Draco’s hand tightened, and Harry reached out, hooked an arm around his neck, and kissed him. “Not here, I said,” he whispered.  
  
“But it would be  _so much fun_ ,” Draco whispered back, his hips rolling at a steady, continuous pace now, almost enough to make Harry shudder and forget about what the fuck they were doing here and what the fuck they needed to do next. Almost, but not enough, in the end. “Think about coming on Ernhardt’s reports, and his files, and leaving it there for the next time he touches it.”  
  
Harry choked, and was glad that he had Draco holding him up at the moment. Draco grinned at him and slid his hands under Harry’s arse, hoisting him up as though to sit him on the desk.  
  
“ _No_ ,” Harry said, and pulled away, just shaking his head all the harder when he saw the flat look on Draco’s face. “No. I did your plan. You’re going to do mine. And we’re going back home.”  
  
“I don’t want to do this on your bed in that disgusting Muggle flat, either,” Draco snapped.  
  
Harry reached for his fingers. It was hard to think. “If you put up the strongest wards you can manage first, then I’ll let you Transfigure the bed in the flat,” he gasped. His wrists stung, his fingers tingled with the way that Draco was touching him, and the way that Draco stared at him only made him harder. “To whatever you want. You can even put on those silly curtains and canopies you like if you please.”  
  
Draco blinked at him, and then his lips pulled back from his teeth in a gesture that Harry suspected he would regret. “Done.”  
  
The air around them trembled with the speed that Draco used to escort him out of the Ministry, and burned from his hand low on Harry’s back. Harry shook his head several times as he thought about that. He didn’t know how they had got here so fast from a simple statement of fact he’d made about the way the Ministry tended to value him.  
  
 _Because that’s not the way that Draco tends to value you._  
  
Maybe that was all it was, at bottom. Harry blinked at nothing, and then shrugged. Well. If that was the case, then at least he would get a bloody good fucking out of it.  
  
*  
  
Draco concentrated on setting up the wards. He didn’t want anything that would let loose a whisper of magic outside them, so if Aurors or the Shadowborn were scouting for them in the narrow Muggle street beyond the flat, they would still walk past convinced this area was pure Muggle.  
  
Draco was thinking about protecting their lives, but also about protecting his private time with Harry. There was no way that he would let that go, no way he would pass this chance up.  
  
He dropped his robes to the floor, his hands already flying over them, and turned around. Harry was sitting in the middle of the bed in the dingy room, his smile faint as he watched Draco. The smile dissolved, and there was a darkness in the green eyes instead that Draco had only recently come to recognize.  
  
Well, he had only recently started  _seeing_  it, too. Draco was glad it had happened, even though he mourned, a little, all the chances he might have missed before that, all the times Harry might have been aroused and he wouldn’t have known the emotion for what it was.  
  
“You don’t need to rush,” Harry said quietly, as Draco flicked his wand at him and Transfigured the bed into one of those green-sheeted monsters that had stood in his rooms in Slytherin all the long, difficult years he was in Hogwarts. It wasn’t much on originality, but it was the first image that came to mind, and Draco had to admit there would be a certain kind of satisfaction if he fucked Harry in one. “We have time.”  
  
“We have the meeting with Granger soon,” Draco said, but then he shook his head and was quiet. That wasn’t the reason he felt as though claws were tearing up his insides when he looked at Harry, or the reason his blood was rushing around his veins, or the reason he wanted to pound Harry into the bed.  
  
Maybe sensing that, Harry shut up, and then reached up and welcomed Draco instead as he bent over him and gave him another savage kiss like the ones they had traded in the Auror offices.   
  
Draco rolled Harry beneath him, panting. He used his hands to take Harry’s clothes off one by one, and slapped Harry’s away when he tried to help. Harry snorted at him and rolled his eyes, but he let Draco do it. He would almost always let Draco do something like this, even if he didn’t understand why it was important.  
  
 _Why_ he’s  _important._  
  
That was what had set it off, Draco thought as he summoned the lube and nudged Harry’s legs apart before Harry had decided how far he wanted to spread them. Hearing Harry speak so casually of the Ministry’s hatred of him, as though they had the  _right_ to hate him, as though Okazes’s stupid argument about Harry consuming more resources than other Aurors was a valid one.  
  
 _It wasn’t_. Draco knew that, and tried to convey it with every dig of his fingers into Harry’s hips or Harry’s arse, every sharp brush of his lips against Harry’s neck, every tap and curl inside him. It would never be, and if the Ministry felt that way, then they should have sacked Harry the moment they understood what he was costing them.  
  
But they  _hadn’t._ They had kept him, and even decided that Draco was nothing more than an instrument to destroy him.  
  
“You’re  _special_ ,” Draco told Harry as he slid into him and Harry sucked in his breath, staring up at him as Draco caught Harry’s legs and hauled them over his shoulders with more savagery than he’d ever shown before. Harry blinked and murmured something, and Draco nodded. “And they wanted to take advantage of that without paying the cost.”  
  
That was it, that was what hit Draco in the pit of the stomach and stirred him to rage. He had been taught from earliest childhood that if you wanted something rare and pure and special, you paid the price. You didn’t cheat a jeweler who was making a wedding ring for you. You didn’t refuse to pay your dueling instructor for giving you his time to make you a better fighter.  
  
And you didn’t enjoy all the advantages of having the Boy-Who-Lived as an Auror and then fuss about the careful handling he needed.  
  
He moved as carefully as he could when he was longing to tear and smash through the barriers that kept Harry from realizing the truth of that. In some ways, Harry was still part of the Ministry that undervalued his skills and Draco’s, still so used to thinking of himself as less than he was, as less important than he really was, that he didn’t realize how much that insulted Draco’s taste and good sense in choosing him.  
  
Harry reached up and put a hand on Draco’s face as he thrust frantically into Harry’s body, rocked with him and swayed with him and was there when Draco came with a furious howl and then sagged over Harry, breathing. Harry reached down with their joined hands and brought himself off, eyes closed as though he was trying to remember what their original argument had been about.  
  
Draco leaned in and kissed Harry’s cheek, and then shook his head when Harry looked at him and raised his eyebrows. “You can’t—do that again,” he said, his voice ragged. “I don’t want you speaking as though you agree with the Ministry’s evaluation of you.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “This is going to be like the thing with the death wish again, isn’t it? I can try to convince you that I don’t think of myself the way the Ministry does, and you won’t believe me. Just like you wouldn’t believe me when I said that I didn’t have a death wish.”  
  
“I didn’t believe you because of what else you said,” Draco said. “And what I saw you do.” He tightened his hands on Harry’s shoulders and waited for his answer. They only had perhaps an hour until their appointed meeting with Granger, a few more than that until the storm inspired by Skeeter’s article would break over the wizarding world, but he would take as long as he needed to make Harry understand him.  
  
“That argument’s done,” Harry said, with a little slashing motion of his head that made Draco love him and want to strangle him in the same moment. “We decided what we were going to do as a result of that belief, and I’m not willing to have it again.” He paused, and his eyes deepened, in a way that had nothing to do with color. “So. All right. I’ll accept what you say for now and not fight it.”  
  
Draco bowed his head and closed his eyes, letting his fingers on Harry’s shoulders relax. “Thank you.”  
  
Harry kissed him, and they lay there for perhaps twenty minutes with their arms around each other before Harry poked Draco in the ribs with an elbow and reminded him that they needed to get moving to attend on Granger. Draco let him do it and didn’t snap at him for it. Harry had agreed.  
  
Sometimes, he had learned, Harry’s love for him  _would_ let him do what Draco asked of him without protesting too much about it.  
  
*  
  
“Are the wards up?”  
  
Harry didn’t turn around as he cast the spell that would check the security of the wards one more time, because the expression on his face would probably give her the wrong idea. She had every reason to be nervous, he thought. She had risked a lot to find this information, and then had chosen not to share it before now even though she must have known that both he and Ron would have liked to know it.  
  
 _And Draco, too._  
  
As he turned around from his fifth check of the wards wrapped tight around this little room in the back of a pub, Harry wondered for a moment if Draco becoming his partner had been part of the reason Hermione had put this off. Ron had left the Aurors two years ago. She knew that Harry was already an outcast in the Ministry by then. Why not just  _tell_ him when Ron was no longer in danger and let him use the information about the Shadowborn as he willed?  
  
But seeing the way she sat with her head bowed and her hands folded in front of her on the table as though drawing up the strength through the wood, Harry dismissed the thought. It had been true fear that drove her. Nothing else would make her look as ill as she did.  
  
He looked to the side and caught Draco’s eye. Draco nodded, and kept whatever ruder words he might have said imprisoned in his mouth, instead reaching out and setting a mug of butterbeer down in front of Hermione.  
  
Hermione blinked and looked up at him, then at the steaming mug.  
  
“We thought it might warm you up,” Draco said without inflection, and without the sexual innuendo Harry had been half-afraid he would put in there. He took the chair at an angle from Hermione across the round table, leaving Harry to take the one directly across. He reached out and stroked Harry’s hand, then rested both his hands on the tabletop as if he needed Hermione to see them. “What do you have to tell us?”  
  
Harry moved his right leg and let it rest against Draco’s. He didn’t trust the way Draco was looking, like a hound ready for the kill.  
  
Hermione took one sip of the butterbeer, and then said, “I found it when I was reading about discrepancies in some of the laws concerning house-elves.” Harry tensed in anticipation of her being about to launch into a lecture, and found himself staggering all the more when Hermione simply continued. “There was clerical work done to cover it up, but the clerks can’t do their jobs when you won’t tell them about the secrets that they’re supposed to be hiding.  
  
“ _They_ were there. Around the edges, if you looked. Coincidental deaths, and Aurors punished for errors on cases after the Wizengamot or the Head Auror had declared them innocent or given a lesser punishment. And someone had written most of the changes into the files with grey ink.” She swallowed. “Someone who wanted to leave a pattern, or maybe just keep a record for their own purposes. I don’t know.”  
  
Harry reached across the table and caught her hands between us, chafing them the way he would if it was cold out, while still keeping his leg resting against Draco’s so Draco wouldn’t get jealous. “Tell us at your own pace, Hermione.”  
  
“I think it was a record for their own purposes,” Hermione said, her voice speeding up, “because no one could remember  _everything_ I found. And it was scattered among so many random files, too. They had to have a way to identify it. They probably thought no one would want to get into the files on house-elves.”  
  
“Of course not,” Draco said, flat as a mirror. “They’re boring.”  
  
Hermione glared at him, and Harry opened his mouth. Then he saw the eyebrow Draco had raised, and fell silent in embarrassment. Yes, well, he should have thought himself that Hermione would fare better if she had someone to be angry at.  
  
“You think that because you had them as slaves,” Hermione said hotly. “They’re remarkable creatures—”  
  
Draco simply looked at her, and seemed to tell her both what he’d done and why they needed her to get back on the path. Harry wished Draco would teach him the trick of that. Hermione swallowed, stopped, cleared her throat, and took another sip of the butterbeer before going on.  
  
“Once I knew what to look for, it was easy to find. A corps of wizards hired to hunt down Aurors and Hit Wizards and duelists who went rogue. A way to keep a leash on them when they were too strong, most of the time, for anyone to really do that. But the Ministry uses them—or they use themselves—whenever they want to. There’s no provision for anything like a review.” Her lips cramped. “And they’re empowered to kill.”  
  
Harry nodded to her, and tried to ignore the tension that made Draco’s leg against his feel like a pillar. “Do you know if they have their own superiors that tell them to kill? Or do they always obey the Ministry hierarchy?”  
  
Draco was staring at him. Harry ignored that. It only made sense, with what they had learned from Okazes, and sometimes he could come up with good questions, too.  
  
Hermione’s hand wavered between them before it dropped to the table. “Sometimes, I think they have superiors, and sometimes they seem to be blended more into the internal hierarchy of the Ministry. The notes on them were inconsistent. But most of the time, _someone_ has to order them to attack. They don’t just decide on their own that Aurors aren’t solving cases the right way.”  
  
Harry nodded. He could feel the pulse in his neck speeding up as Draco stared at him, but really, he didn’t know why. He had made a logical connection. If Head Auror Ernhardt had set Draco up to fail, then he might have set the Shadowborn on their trail as well. It didn’t feel like a wild leap or a coincidence to Harry.  
  
And after decades of surviving by them, he had learned to trust his instincts. Lionel had made him stop doing that, but Draco had been the one to show him that Harry couldn’t have predicted the way Lionel would react to being told that Harry was in love with him, or Lionel’s death. This time, he could trust what he thought.  
  
“Then I think we know who our enemies are,” he said quietly. “Thank you, Hermione.” He hesitated, and then gave in. “What made you so frightened of them? Even a secret group hiding within the Ministry itself wouldn’t normally scare you that much. Hell, you can describe the Unspeakables as like that, sometimes. How much do we know about their experiments? But you aren’t afraid of them in the same way.”  
  
Hermione grimaced and closed her eyes. “I was reading one of the files that had notes in grey, and the letters rearranged themselves,” she whispered. “They became words that—that addressed me by name, and let me know they were watching. I never heard of spells that could do that. I’ve heard of ones that would be triggered when someone else opened the folder, but not at a random time in the middle of the file. And I’m sure that no one else was in the library with me.”  
  
Harry nodded. It made sense to him—if not for Draco, given the way his eyes were narrowed—that Hermione would fear someone who had knowledge she didn’t. And that made sense out of her pronouncement that the Shadowborn could hear and track people who spoke their name, which otherwise Harry didn’t know how she’d found out.   
  
“Thank you,” he said, when they’d waited a few more minutes and Hermione sat there in silence, her burning eyes fixed on them. “Thank you for telling us. We’re going to go up against them, but we’ll be careful.”  
  
“It’s like fighting Unspeakables, that’s the problem,” Hermione said, so softly that Harry almost thought she was talking to herself. “How can we know  _all_ that they know? How can we know what kinds of trick they might come up with next? It’s not safe to struggle against them because they could do anything.”  
  
“Thank you for giving us your expert opinion, as someone who knows a lot about revolution,” Draco said, his voice almost gentle. At least, he didn’t flinch when Harry gave him a sharp look, the way that he really should have if he didn’t mean it. “But we have no choice. They’ve already tried to kill us once.”  
  
“You can’t do this without allies on the inside.” Hermione looked at them, her fingers curling up into her palms. “I’m willing to be that. If you’ll let me.” She glared at Draco in a way that made it clear where she expected the opposition to come from.  
  
“Thank you,” Draco said.  
  
Harry heard the refusal that was coming and let his hand clamp down, casually—or not-so-casually—on Draco’s arm. Draco winced and leaned back in his chair. Harry nodded encouragingly to him, and then faced Hermione.   
  
“Thank you,” he said. “Yes, we’ll be glad to accept your help.”  
  
Draco had an expression on his face that Harry might have called sulking if he wanted to get his face punched in. Hermione relaxed in a rush and picked up her butterbeer. “ _Thank_ you. Now, Harry, we should work out a code so that we can refer to  _them_  and not get caught out in owls. If you’ll be on the run for a while…”  
  
“Too late.”  
  
Draco’s voice was gentle. Harry turned his head, tense. The wards were so thick that he couldn’t be sure what kind of enemies might have arrived, but when he concentrated, he could make out voices conversing just outside the room. The next second, the door resounded with a knock.  
  
Draco and Harry reached for their wands with one accord, a moment before the door flew open and the Shadowborn glided in.


	18. Coming Together

Experienced as they were, the Shadowborn still paused when they’d come through the door, taking in the situation, and the fact that there was one more person in the room than they’d expected. Harry knew that moment of hesitation would come. It was something he would do himself, confident that his enemies would be taken as off-guard as he was by the intrusion.  
  
But it cost them this time, when they were facing two trained Aurors. While they blinked and peered, Draco had extended his hand, and Harry had taken it, and they had spun so that their arms were linked and they were back-to-back.  
  
Harry raised a shield around them, with a hole in the middle right where he knew Draco would put his wand. Through the hole, Draco fired a curse, and then turned, hauling Harry with him. It caught the lead Shadowborn on the shoulder, and he staggered and then went heavily down, his body already turning to stone. Since the spell could be reversed, it wasn’t even technically Dark magic.  
  
Before the Shadowborn could retaliate or catch their breaths, Harry was swinging around to fire his own hex through that hole, then repair it and open another one in the shield, further up. His spell made the Shadowborn still piling into the room slip on the suddenly Transfigured floor, covered by a thin layer of oil.  
  
And he turned, and Draco came along, having used the moment of recovery to decide on his next spell. And there it was, the curse that Harry saw only from the corner of his eye, but recognized anyway by the flash of its red-gold tail. He smiled into the distance. That curse would blind everyone in the room with ill-will towards the caster. He could only hope that Hermione had either hidden her face or was already hiding under the table and had had the sense to cover her eyes.  
  
A swing, a turn, and it was Harry’s chance to come around again. The nearest Shadowborn, however, either got lucky, or had had the skill to mark the position of the hole in the shield, even blind. His spell tunneled through and scraped a long and bloody slash down Harry’s shoulder, shredding the cloth on its way and earthing itself in the bones of his wrist like a lightning bolt.  
  
Harry hissed, and didn’t manage to fire the spell he’d decided on after all before Draco swung him back around. He uttered another hiss at the missed chance, but reached out and put his good hand on Draco’s shoulder when he saw the look in Draco’s eyes.  
  
“You don’t need to kill them,” he said quietly. “You really don’t, Draco.” He hesitated, and then added, because these were still the Shadowborn even if they were stumbling around right now, blind, “I don’t think so, anyway.”  
  
“They hurt you.” Draco turned to face him, brushed his wand along the cut, and released a cooling, soothing liquid that dried the blood. Harry shut his eyes and shivered.   
  
“They did,” he agreed. Draco would have felt his flinch and heard his sound of pain, so there was no point in trying to hide it. “But I can still use my wand, so they didn’t take me out of the fight even though they were trying for that. You might as well do something else to round them up.”  
  
Draco’s smile stretched, and he looked at the Shadowborn with an interest that made Harry almost glad they couldn’t see. “Round them up,” he murmured. “Yes, that would be an interesting use for a set of skills that I haven’t tested in years.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Hermione demanded from under the table. A few Shadowborn wands swung towards the sound of her voice, and Harry placed a prudent Shield Charm around the table’s legs, although Hermione had already done that. His shields were stronger. “You can’t do something  _inhumane_  to them. Harry, you can’t let him.”  
  
“Shut up, Granger,” Draco said, and Harry nodded frantically to Hermione. Anything that would get the look out of Draco’s eyes, short of murder, was fine with him. And if they could keep the Shadowborn for questioning, or at least prevent them from going back to the Ministry and reporting their location, then they would have control of things again. Harry moved out of the way as Draco concentrated, then swung his wand in a wide circle that encompassed all the Shadowborn in the room.  
  
“ _Commuto porcos_ ,” Draco whispered.  
  
There was a complicated shimmer that seemed to replace Harry’s view of the Shadowborn, and then their robes wrapped and draped around them. A undignified, terrified squealing came from under the robes. Harry began to suspect what Draco had done, and started laughing even before the first piglets came squirming from under the robes into the light. They ran in mad circles, but Draco waved his wand again, and a net seemed to come down from the ceiling or rise from the floor—maybe both at once—and scoop them up. They lay against one another, trotters waving helplessly.  
  
“You meant your Transfiguration skills,” Hermione said, standing up and staring at Draco as if he was a stranger.  
  
“Yes, of course I did,” Draco said, and rolled his eyes at her. Hermione blinked and looked as if she didn’t know what to do.  
  
Harry nodded to the piglets. “That will hold them for a while. I think we’d better get out of here, though, before someone figures out what’s going on, or more of  _them_ come to see what happened to the first ones.” He still didn’t feel like speaking the word “Shadowborn” aloud, even if the ones currently in the room had found them some other way.  
  
“A moment,” Draco said, and nodded to Hermione. “Granger, you know more healing spells than I do.” It was nearly a command. “See what you can do for Harry’s arm. Can’t have him bleeding everywhere.”  
  
Harry shook his head at Draco as Hermione walked to his side with her back stiff. He knew Hermione wouldn’t believe him if he tried to explain that look in Draco’s eyes when he first realized Harry was hurt, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted her to. It was good to have  _some_ secrets.  
  
“It’s not that deep,” Hermione said, when she had stripped away the soothing liquid that Draco’s charm had created on Harry’s cut. Harry held his breath through that, and didn’t cry out, because that would only make Draco angry at Hermione for something she couldn’t help and make everything worse. “You should take it easy with the arm, though.” She tapped the cut and murmured little words of gentle encouragement, and the skin knit itself with remarkable speed. Harry nodded. He always resolved to study healing magic more and never did, but if the ban from St. Mungo’s endured for a while and they lost access to the Ministry Healers, he would have to.  
  
“Good,” Hermione said, standing away from Harry when he had showed her that he could bend his arm to her satisfaction. “What the fuck was  _that_ all about?” She nodded to the squirming net of piglets. “If you could do that before, why didn’t you do it the first time they showed up?”  
  
“I didn’t know then what they wanted,” Draco said, working his own wrist back and forth as he stared up at the net. “And I didn’t think that my Transfiguration skills were up to it. But now we know what works against them.” He turned to Harry. “Another case for your skills at making them forget, I think. I don’t want to kill them, but I also don’t want them going back to report what we can do.”  
  
Harry felt his face heat up as Hermione stared at him. He hadn’t actually advised his friends that he was good at Memory Charms, either. But for now, all he could say was, “If we go with my plan to capture Bainbridge and the blue-eyed twisted, then I don’t think we’ll need to  _Obliviate_ them.”  
  
“Your famous plan,” Draco said, with a faint frown. “I don’t understand how it was supposed to work before, and now we know that the grey ones might not be far behind us. How do we take the time to set it up when someone could come bursting in on us at any moment?” He looked up at the piglets and shook his head. “That’s going to take some powerful Disillusionment and Silencing Charms to get out of here.”  
  
Harry swallowed. He thought he’d understood and planned for everything, but what if he hadn’t? He might be responsible for getting Draco or anyone else who helped hurt.  
  
Then he remembered the way Draco had Transfigured a bunch of people for him, and he saw the steady faith with which they both looked at him—even if there were also questions in Hermione’s eyes and waiting on her tongue—and he knew that it didn’t matter. If he had forgotten something, they would tell him. That was what it meant to have friends, and a partner, who trusted him.  
  
“This is what I want us to do,” he said.  
  
*  
  
Draco looked at Granger and winced. He had done his best, but her own magic was powerful, and that tended to rebel against Transfigurations tried on the hair and face. Draco hadn’t dared use glamours. If they were the only disguise Granger had, Bainbridge would probably sense them when he got close.  
  
“You could be in danger,” he said for the third time. He had agreed to Harry’s plan, but he had thought Granger would refuse the part Harry wanted her to play. When she hadn’t, he had tried to encourage her to back out. They could find someone else, a female Auror, for example, to do this. When Harry had pointed out that they didn’t have anyone else to contact, Draco had still been desperate to come up with a solution. “Are you sure that you can handle yourself if Bainbridge suddenly appears?”  
  
Granger scowled at him. He knew that scowl, even through the Transfigurations of sleek blonde hair he’d cast on her and the way he’d made her eye blue and her lips fuller and redder. “I know what kind of risks I’m taking, Malfoy,” she retorted. “There were times I helped Ron and Harry on their Auror work, when they were still partners.”  
  
Draco blinked. He hadn’t known  _that_. But it made sense that Granger would be familiar with intrigue, at least, since they had poked their noses into everything as children. He made a mental note to ask Harry about working with Granger on cases later.  
  
 _If we survive this._  
  
Draco let out a calming breath. At least he couldn’t accuse Harry of wanting to hide out and not carry the battle to the enemy anymore. This was carrying the battle to the enemy with a vengeance.   
  
“Very well,” he said. “Can you use an auditory glamour on your voice? I don’t know if anyone will recognize it, but at least it might make you seem more like a Sarah.”  
  
Granger smiled with her teeth alone, but touched her wand to the base of her throat. A moment later, a soft, squeaky voice that Draco would have associated with Pansy Parkinson if he hadn’t seen it coming out of Granger’s mouth said, “Will this do?”  
  
Draco blinked at her, and then inclined his head jerkily. “Fine. Come on. He’ll be waiting for us.”  
  
“Him and all the rest of the wizarding world,” said Granger, and swept out of the back room of the pub. Harry had gone through already, taking the load of Shadowborn-piglets out under the powerful glamours and charms that Granger had used. She’d offered to cast them, since she would have to use less magic in the pursuit of this mad plan than Draco or Harry would. The owner of the pub stared at them suspiciously anyway.  
  
Draco smiled at him in a way that made him decide to look elsewhere, and then they were standing in the street in front of it, hurrying towards the Apparition point. Draco sped up, and Granger hissed at him. He shortened his steps again, wishing he was walking beside Harry.  
  
 _Soon. One way or the other._  
  
*  
  
Harry paused and looked around him, trying to estimate how many people would hear him when he made his declaration. The Atrium had more or less a normal number of people for this time of morning, which meant many hurrying back and forth between the Floos, and Aurors dragging along sullen suspects, and flunkies chattering to other flunkies while balancing enormous piles of folders in their arms.   
  
It looked more normal than Harry had thought, in fact. Then he snorted as he realized where his thoughts were tending. Yes, of course, everyone should stop their routines in distress and clasp their hands to faltering hearts over Harry Potter going on the run. Most of them were probably nodding and thinking they had predicted it anyway, that Harry had never been happy as an Auror and a bit of a loose hex caroming around the building.  
  
Which could make things difficult for him now, if someone decided to play hero and take him down.  
  
Harry shook his head and reached into his pocket, moving slowly so that no one would notice the ripple of shadow and color that the Disillusionment Charm produced if you knew what to look for. He heard no shrieks of outraged virtue yet, which was a good thing. When he got ready to produce shrieks, that wasn’t the kind he wanted.  
  
He curled his hand around the little badge that Draco had implanted with what he said was “a Dark Shield Charm.” Harry had raised his eyebrows, but Draco had assured him it would work, and also that Harry was to use it if there was the slightest chance someone would curse him before he could spring the trap. They could blame Draco for the Dark Arts if they had to, but Draco wanted Harry safe.  
  
Remembering the look in Draco’s eyes when he said that, and the way he had reached out and then hastily tucked his hand back against his side because of the look on Hermione’s face, Harry smiled. Yes, he would do what he could to keep Draco’s worry at bay, because it was Draco, and Draco loved him.  
  
He took the badge out of his pocket and turned it over. It must have been torn from a set of Draco’s Auror robes; the trailing threads on the edges were scarlet. Harry stroked it with one finger before he held it up and tapped the back of it twice with two fingers, the way Draco had told him he should.  
  
The magic in it bloomed in front of him, unfolding violently enough to make Harry shudder. It tore through the Disillusionment Charm, and most of the eyes in the Atrium turned in his direction. A moment later, he heard the shrieks of recognition.  
  
Harry grimaced, and lifted his wand, ready to block the first hex, a Stunner that one of the Aurors hauling a prisoner hurled at him.   
  
The badge leaped into the air before him, and the magic that had expanded from it formed into a billowing, rippling shield in front of him, the way Draco had promised it would. It looked like a kite, almost, but it was black, and soft, and cold, from the way that Harry felt it chill his hands. It swallowed the Stunner as though it had jaws, instead of reflecting it the way a Shield Charm normally would. Harry could still see the other people in the Atrium as he looked through it, but it was like peering through dirty water.  
  
Someone tried to sneak around the side of the shield and try another Stunner. The shield promptly grew, forming a half-circle in front of him on all sides; Harry had already backed himself into a corner, as Draco had instructed. Someone else tried to bounce a curse off the ceiling, which Harry had to admit was a clever tactic, and the shield was there, too, up and down and all around, glowing more and more fiercely the more magic it ate.  
  
That got all the attention he could wish for.   
  
“A Dark Shield!” an Auror by the Fountain whispered, and that rumor ran around the room. Of course, most of the people didn’t try to press out the doors as they should, because that would make too much  _sense._ Instead, they pressed closer and closer to the shield, eyes as wide as it was.  
  
Harry smiled grimly. He had got the attention he’d asked for, the attention that was necessary to make his plan work.  
  
And, he hoped, draw both Bainbridge and the blue-eyed twisted out of hiding, or at least into a place where Harry and Draco could combat them. Harry had decided that their best chance of being reinstated in the Ministry, and recovering the career Draco had worked so long and hard for, was spectacularly solving their current case and revealing the blue-eyed twisted at the same time.  
  
If it happened to cause chaos in the Ministry as well, that was good. The chaos might end in the Ministry at least doing something different about twisted, or it might end up in them receiving their former jobs back and apologies from the Ministry hierarchy.  
  
Harry wouldn’t cling to wild dreams, though. He would be content with them having their jobs back.  
  
“You’d probably heard that I’d gone rogue,” he said conversationally to the stares. He had chosen his site well, he thought. There were people here who would listen to anything he said, rather than walk out the door and miss this. “My name is Harry Potter. And I’m here to tell you what’s  _really_ happening in the Ministry’s hierarchy, in the Socrates Corps, and with Head Auror Ernhardt.”  
  
*  
  
“When we come through the door, I want you to look around and announce—”  
  
“I don’t need coaching for this part, Malfoy.”  
  
Draco bit his lip hard enough that his ears rang, but then he simply nodded and stood out of the way to let Granger—disguised as Sarah Offer—walk in front of him. This was the part that he liked the best, because at least he was close to Harry again as they entered the Atrium and could get to him if he needed help. And if Granger got herself injured because of her insistence that she could take care of herself, that might show Harry that his friends weren’t as smart as he thought they were.  
  
Not that Draco would stay out of it if Granger needed help. He might be a bastard, but not the kind who would want Harry’s friends hurt simply to prove a point. Harry would be insufferable to live with afterwards.  
  
No one noticed them come in at first. They were listening in silence to the tale that Harry was spinning, safe behind his shield and with his wand in hand. Perhaps some of them had remembered how good he was with it, Draco thought, and hoped. From the looks of it, though, a few people had tried to get around the Dark Shield, so perhaps not.  
  
“…and that’s the reason that Head Auror Ernhardt has the grudge against us, supposedly,” Harry said, glancing around from face to face. He hadn’t seen Draco and Granger yet either, then. Draco was sure that he would have looked at them immediately if so. “He thinks I cost the Ministry too much money.”  
  
“You _do_ ,” snapped one of the Aurors that Draco knew by sight although not by name, a tall brown-haired man with a sulky mouth. “The fees and lawsuits that hit the Ministry, the way they all want to talk to  _you_. No one else can get a word in edgewise, and no one else can get half the credit that you do.”  
  
“Perhaps that’s because I actually  _solve_ my cases, Fethridge,” Harry said, with a poisonous sweetness that Draco had never known was in him.   
  
It made him want to take Harry home and fuck him again.  
  
Amid the laughter, Fethridge tried to say something else, but it was a tall woman who interrupted. Draco thought she worked as a secretary for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. “That’s interesting, but why should we believe you? It might be a fine fairy tale, not the truth.”  
  
Harry shrugged a little. “I know it sounds mad. But I believe that there’s evidence I can offer that  _someone_ in the Ministry hierarchy is concerned about what I say. The Ministry didn’t simply say they were concerned and we should come in and talk to them. They sent wizards to kill us.”  
  
Granger stiffened beside Draco, barely breathing. “Tell me that he’s not going to do it,” she whispered. “Tell me that it would be too mad, even for  _him_.”  
  
“Why don’t you tell him that?” Draco asked out of the side of his mouth. “Except I think you’re too far away to do any good.”  
  
“The Shadowborn,” Harry said flatly. “Secret police who punish the Aurors and others who might be too dangerous to arrest, and who might  _say_ something and be believed by the people they give their lives to protect. Or who might actually kill the people the Ministry sends to arrest them if wrongfully accused. The Shadowborn can kill without mercy, and they can track those who speak of them by name.” He raised his voice to compete with the babble that broke out, and he must have cast the  _Sonorus_ Charm without Draco noticing, because suddenly his voice boomed above it. “But their power is secrecy! They can’t track and kill everyone in the wizarding world, and they can’t silence everyone here, especially if some of you leave right now.”  
  
That provoked a scramble for the Floos. Draco stood back out of the way, with his arm across Granger’s chest to ensure she didn’t try to interfere. This was what they wanted. Spread the word, and the Shadowborn would lose their ability to corner and  _Obliviate_ or intimidate everyone in the room.  
  
“I challenge the Head Auror to appear and contradict what I said,” Harry said, crossing his arms. “Or silence me. If he wants to challenge or change what I’m about to say, about the way the Ministry treats the Socrates Corps and the twisted, then he’ll  _have_ to come.”  
  
Draco wondered if he was the only one who heard the rumble of the lifts. Head Auror Ernhardt might well be on his way down now. He hoped that Harry was ready. He had come up with the plan to attract an audience, and hopefully have everyone there when the blue-eyed twisted and Bainbridge appeared—the blue-eyed twisted drawn by the revelation of his existence, Bainbridge by Granger dressed up as Sarah Offer.  
  
Harry had explained, convincingly, how he meant to quell Bainbridge and the blue-eyed twisted once they had them there, but Draco could hardly help being nervous.  
  
And then Harry screamed, and Draco saw a flinch of blue in his eyes before they slammed shut and his hands went up to grip either side of his head.  
  
Draco felt his heart beating and his mouth drying. The plan had gone wrong, and the blue-eyed twisted was here earlier, when there was no  _reason_ for him to be. It wasn’t as though the blue-eyed twisted cared about the Shadowborn, or had heard Harry talk about him yet—  
  
 _He’s insane. Suspicion that Harry might mention him could be enough._  
  
And Draco had perhaps two seconds to decide what to do, before the Head Auror arrived, Granger dashed into battle despite his restraining arm, or Harry yielded to the blue-eyed twisted—or all three happened at once.


	19. Call to the Rescue

Harry flailed deep in the dark, unending pit beneath the surface of his mind, the pit Blue Eyes had cast him into. He could hear the laughter, echoing everywhere, cold and hard and as liable to shatter his bones as boulders thrown at him.  
  
He thought the blue-eyed twisted had expected him to panic, or at best reach for his Patronus again, which wouldn’t do any good when Blue Eyes knew that trick now, and how to counter it. But Harry had heard Voldemort laugh, and it sounded worse than this. Voldemort had been more powerful, too, and more determined to kill him.  
  
 _You think I am not?_  
  
The pressure was everywhere around him, a band of iron encircling his temples, making his tongue stick out and his voice gasp. Harry dragged his nails down his arm, and felt the pain centering him, for a moment before Blue Eyes swept that away and replaced it with stronger pain, deeper pain, pain that seemed to well up out of him as well as being inflicted from the outside.  
  
 _I will have you. I know how to conquer you now. But I see no reason not to torture you first,_ said Blue Eyes in a soft, wistful voice that scared Harry more than almost anything he had done so far.  
  
But he had had a plan to deal with this, with both Bainbridge and Blue Eyes, and although he would have to do it faster than he had planned on, he saw no reason not to go ahead with it. He brought up his wand, struggling against the forces that wanted him to keep his hands at his side, and felt Blue Eyes’s focus sharpen abruptly. He had assumed that Harry couldn’t do anything while he played with him, maybe, or he had thought that he would have time to master Harry’s muscles and wand before that could happen.  
  
Now Harry squinted and panted his defiance at the concern in his mind, and cast the first spell, the one that would establish the bridge between them, the link that he needed to complete the next part of the plan.  
  
“ _Creo pontem_ ,” he whispered, and the spell seemed to fill up the inside of his brain, expanding, pushing outwards, at his cerebellum and brainstem, and he laughed aloud and his words echoed like clicking pebbles to the sound of the screams.  
  
The bridge that was opened raced along from him, from his scar, specifically, burning and shining, in the direction of Blue Eyes. He tried to jerk away, but he had come too far into Harry’s head, and perhaps, even now, he didn’t want to reveal his body’s location to Harry.  
  
Even though Harry was beginning to suspect he knew it.  
  
The bridge landed, and the supports linked and locked and leashed into place. Harry could feel the connection between his mind and Blue Eyes’s, swaying like ropes, like gossamer, like the silk of cocoons. But strong for all that, strong, strong, strong. Harry lifted a hand to his forehead and clenched his fingers into his scar.  
  
The similarities between them were the ones he had suspected all along. He had been  _right_ when he told Draco that most of the Socrates Aurors had flaws, that they could be twisted too if the Ministry just changed their definitions a little bit. And Blue Eyes had acted all along as though he cared about twisted, either eliminating them before they could challenge them or trying to prevent Harry and Draco from getting too good at hunting them.   
  
 _Because then we could go after you. Isn’t that right?_  
  
There was no response in words, only the panicked thrashing at the end of his line, like a large, hooked fish. Harry nodded in response and murmured the spell again, fixing it harder in him.  
  
He had a gift, a flaw: seeing visions of future murders. It had always seemed rooted in his scar, the way that Draco’s ability to feel Dark magic was rooted in his Mark. And that meant Harry was similar, in his own way, to Blue Eyes.  
  
Similar enough to reach out through it, if he could come up with the right spell, similar enough to stay in contact as long as he wanted to. And he could do the same thing to Bainbridge, if he could control his fear of what he would find in that corrupted mind.  
  
 _More dangerous than Blue Eyes?_  
  
Yes. Bainbridge did seem that way to him. At least he’d been in contact with Blue Eyes before, if never willingly, while he never had with Bainbridge, and wasn’t looking forward to the experience if he did have to have it.  
  
Blue Eyes called his attention back by wrenching against the bridge again. Harry repeated the spell once more, and felt the alignment between their minds strengthen to the point where it would take outside magic to separate them.  
  
Fortunately, Harry had a source of that outside magic not far away.  
  
He opened his eyes and turned his head, and found chaos in the Atrium: Aurors gathered around a pale and staring Head Auror Ernhardt, Draco casting spells to keep the people trying to attack and arrest him at bay, and Hermione standing in the middle of it, her arms spread and her head tilted back as if she was offering herself to the gods of the ceiling.  
  
“I am Sarah Offer!” she said, making her voice thunder. “If someone wants to come and claim my life, then I proclaim here and now that I can tell my  _own_ story, and I have no reason to want someone else to tell it! I was born into a small family in Hogsmeade, and from the first, my dear mother—”  
  
There was a half-explosion to the side, and when Harry turned his head, he could see Bainbridge moving forwards, clad in that dark, buzzing, smoke-like magic that obscured his face but not his intent.  
  
Harry took a quick, deep breath, and hoped that Draco and Hermione would both remember their parts as he had drilled them, and not break the plan because they were afraid for him, and that Blue Eyes wouldn’t show a previously unsuspected ability and break free. Then he began to cast the spell that would link his mind with Bainbridge’s.  
  
*  
  
Draco cast Shield Charms and defensive hexes only, as Harry had told him, even though he knew spells that could have made the petty wizards trying to punish him for the crime of political unorthodoxy writhe on the floor and spew their guts out. They couldn’t look like the evil ones, Harry had explained, and they would, at least if they cast too many Dark Arts spells.  
  
Draco was nearly ready to tell Harry to sod off, though. Harry had dropped to his knees with his hands wrapped around his head and—  
  
And now he was back on his feet, and Bainbridge was moving in, right on schedule, aimed at the disguised Granger as though he was incapable of seeing anything else.  
  
Draco swallowed. Right. This mad plan of Harry’s was actually working, when he had never thought it would. That meant he had to remember what came next. He fell back a step and raised the largest Shield Charm yet in front of himself, one that would take even the most skillful Aurors’ curses a while to work through.  
  
Then the shadows swirled, and grey-clad wizards filled the Atrium.  
  
Draco heard Granger’s voice falter, which didn’t seem to deter Bainbridge. He did slow a bit, but his wand was still out, and Draco could hear him saying something soft and soothing about how everyone would know the truth of her life soon. The Shadowborn oriented on Harry and him, and raised their wands as one.  
  
Then Bainbridge shrieked, and that sound was so truly awful, so glass-shattering, that wizards who had been preparing to fling hexes at Draco turned to look.  
  
Harry had achieved the spell that linked their minds and their flaws together, he thought as he saw Bainbridge on his knees with his hands clasping either side of his head and the exact same expression on his face that Harry had worn when Blue Eyes began invading his mind.  
  
That meant Draco and Granger had to  _move._  He caught her eye and nodded, hoping that the spells they had trained to cast together would still work now that the Shadowborn had arrived and made everything infinitely more complicated.   
  
Granger smiled and stood upright, waving her wand so that a scroll began to unfurl in the air in front of her. The blood-red lettering on it was huge and could be read from a distance: the history of Blue Eyes, the facts about the Shadowborn that Granger had gathered in her research, the way that twisted only existed in a Ministry definition. There were people who tried to read it instead of running or casting, of course. Count on the wizarding world’s curiosity to make it pause in the middle of a battle to read gossip.  
  
And in the meantime, Draco closed his eyes and touched his wand to his Dark Mark. They had agreed it should be this way, because while Harry’s flaw  _seemed_ linked to his scar, Draco  _knew_ that his was linked to his Mark, and it was easier to complete the spell when there was a tangible physical thing to earth it in.  
  
 _I still could have played the other part. Blue Eyes might have attacked me instead. Harry could have done this. His scar has borne powerful magic before._  
  
But things were as they were, and Draco had agreed to this. He would keep faith with Harry now. He scraped his wand back and forth, and the answering tingle from the Dark Mark as he chanted the spell nonverbally meant that he knew everything was working as it should be, that the magic was rising to the fore.  
  
His arm seemed to burst into invisible flames. Draco turned his head, gasping, and focused on the nearest Shadowborn, who was tracing his wand back and forth in delicate curves that left the air scarred with dove-grey letters.  
  
The Shadowborn met his eyes, and hesitated.  
  
Draco half-shrugged. The man had been chosen as the victim and conduit of the spell because he was casting the first Dark Arts spell Draco had felt after increasing the sensitivity of his flaw. He jabbed his wand forwards, and the magic pulled tight between him and the Shadowborn, dumping his sensations on the man. He screamed and began ripping at the sleeve that covered his left arm, distracting most of his companions.  
  
Draco smiled and faced Harry, casting the spell that would link them with much more confidence this time. He couldn’t feel bad about this, even if he felt pain. Linking himself to Harry was—  
  
 _What I want to do. A dream._  
  
 _No dream,_ Harry seemed to whisper as the link flowed open between them, and Draco caught a trace of three linked minds, Harry and Blue Eyes thrashing on the line and Bainbridge screaming in panic, unused to sharing his thoughts with anyone.  _We are doing this, and I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you, Draco._  
  
Draco nodded, eyes closing, and cast the final spell, the one that would make the magic inflicting pain on the Shadowborn increase.  
  
And then come back to him.  
  
He screamed as it poured through him like a thundering waterfall, sweeping sanity and habit and custom aside, and then hit the full confines of the link. For a moment, it eddied, and Draco believed the plan wouldn’t work, that he would be left with the agony contained in him and nowhere for it to go.  
  
Then it found the way, and leaped down the path to Harry, through the connections between their souls and their flaws. And Harry directed it, although screaming himself, throwing it in a burning, bile-colored flood down the link to Bainbridge and Blue Eyes, splitting it two ways. They were both bound to him, but not to each other, and Draco heard the screaming that came from Bainbridge’s mouth as Harry forced the pain away from him, into Bainbridge’s flaw and veins.  
  
And the screaming that emerged from the mouth of Head Auror Ernhardt.  
  
Draco felt his head turn in that direction, felt his mouth open, in what seemed like a Time-Delayed Charm. The realization thundered in his ears, stronger for a moment than the screams, stronger than the echo of the pain.  
  
 _He is Blue Eyes._  
  
Harry seemed to realize it at the same time, and started surging physically across the room towards Ernhardt. Shadowborn scrambled to stop him, and Draco aimed his wand and let loose with a carefully-aimed Blasting Curse that hit in the middle of them and sent them rolling and flying like dropped paper clips. Then he leaped away from Granger’s side and towards Harry. Granger might have needed his protection during the first part of this plan, but Harry was the one who needed it now.  
  
*  
  
 _No wonder the Head Auror hated us so much. No wonder he seemed to always know what we were doing. No wonder he assigned Draco to me; he must have hoped that any chance that I would find and arrest twisted, and get close to him, would be frustrated by having a partner who wouldn’t cooperate with me.  
  
No wonder his voice sounded familiar._  
  
Harry wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got to Ernhardt. It wasn’t as though he had any  _physical_ proof that the man had tried to kill him. All he had was the link vibrating between them, still pouring pain—pain that Harry hoped would be sufficient to burn out the man’s flaw altogether, to damage his gift to possess others—and anguish into Ernhardt’s head. For the moment, Ernhardt was too distracted to defend himself.  
  
But there were others who would defend him, particularly when they saw Harry and Draco both running towards the Head Auror.  
  
Harry jumped over a Shadowborn who was lying on the floor to aim her wand at his ankles, and found that he had come directly into the path of another curse, which he caught on the chest. He grunted and dropped, ignoring the burning that spread across his chest, even the sound of sizzling flesh. It was  _nothing_ compared to the pain that he had sent through himself like a flood only a few minutes earlier.  
  
But it made Draco change direction, from the sound of his footsteps. Now he was running towards Harry instead of Ernhardt.  
  
Harry jerked his head up and forced his stinging eyes to clear from the tears of pain they wanted to weep, focusing on Ernhardt as some of the Shadowborn surrounded him and started to escort him towards the lifts. He couldn’t walk on his own, but they would support him, and away from Harry, the link would weaken.  
  
He might regain control of himself, and be able to punish someone else, possess someone else.  
  
Harry couldn’t have that. He pushed his hands beneath himself and jolted back to his feet in the same moment as Draco got there and tried to tear open his robes to see the wound that the burning curse had left on his chest.  
  
“Don’t care,” he gasped, swatting at Draco’s hands. “We’ve got to stop him. This is the only chance we’re ever going to have to take him by surprise, and we can’t have—”  
  
A loud snarl came from the side, and Harry turned his head. Bainbridge was back on his feet, and in his eyes was the madness of a man carried beyond pain into another country altogether. He lifted his hand at Harry, and Harry felt the pull of Dark magic even before Draco winced next to him and tried to cover his Mark with one hand.  
  
Bainbridge was going to use his power to flay people and write the truth in blood on their skins against them. He no longer cared about whether the victims were famous or not.  
  
Harry shoved Draco out of the way. He would be the one to deal with this and face it, since it was the vestiges of his plan gone wrong.  
  
“ _Harry_ ,” Draco said, staggering as he caught himself on the Fountain of Magical Brethren, a promise in his voice deadlier, in its way, than the growl gathering beneath Bainbridge’s. But Harry couldn’t pay attention, couldn’t turn towards him, could see nothing but the whirling, building tunnel of Bainbridge’s magic.  
  
Someone crashed into Bainbridge from the side, before Harry had time to do more than tug a little on the pain flowing through him, trying to send more to Bainbridge through the link that still faintly connected them.  
  
Not someone, some _thing_ , Harry saw a moment later. An enormous skeleton of a dog, its jaws pointed and crushing, its fangs unbroken and driving straight into Bainbridge, binding flesh to bone and drawing blood. The dog reared, its claws sinking into Bainbridge’s shoulders, and then it shook its head, sending the blood leaping. Bainbridge shrieked and staggered back, minus several of his fingers.  
  
Harry turned his head and saw Macgeorge standing off to the side, her hands twisting. Perhaps it was because of the link between him and Draco, but he thought he could feel the Dark magic steaming off her, evaporating almost as soon as it touched the air, but present, and overwhelming, and choking.   
  
Macgeorge’s attention was all on Bainbridge, and more of her bone creatures hurtled down from the ceiling towards him. Harry couldn’t take the time to worry about what it would mean, to show necromancy this openly. Bainbridge was handled for the moment, couldn’t stand in their way.  
  
And Head Auror Ernhardt, with his escort, had nearly reached the lifts.  
  
Harry sprang forwards—  
  
And an arm curled around his waist, halting him. He turned, nearly screaming with frustration. Was it Hermione? Didn’t she  _realize_ that their plan had worked, that they had found the home body of the blue-eyed twisted, and that they needed to reach him as fast as possible so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else?  
  
Not Hermione, he realized a moment later when the familiar scent trickled into his nostrils and he recognized the strength of the arms around his waist. Draco. Holding him as though he thought Harry would sprint into danger and leave him behind.  
  
 _Oh_.  
  
Harry let his muscles relax for just a moment, and cleared his throat. “I made the decision for you,” he said, speaking as rapidly as he could. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. We should share the risks together, even from twisted. Now, will you let me  _go_?” And he lunged hard, breaking Draco’s hold and heading for the lifts.  
  
“We’ll discuss it more later,” Draco said calmly. “I agree that this isn’t an appropriate place. You wouldn’t hear half the words I wanted to say to you.”  
  
Harry turned to glare, and it was only that which made him miss a curse one of the Shadowborn had hurled. He swallowed, nodded, and reached out a hand to Draco, who took it.  
  
Together, they ran for the lifts.  
  
*  
  
Draco had no intention of taking the lifts themselves. For one thing, they were too slow, and Ernhardt—it was still strange to think of the blue-eyed twisted as having a name, and one that was known to them—could be safe in his office by now, or through a Floo, and they needed to reach his office before then. Draco was absolutely sure he would go there. It was part of the psychology of twisted, that they so often needed a place to be secure, and would think of their lairs before anything else. The problem was finding them.  
  
And for another thing, Ernhardt might still have the authority or the magical power to possess someone and order the lifts used against them.  
  
He grabbed Harry’s hands when he started pounding on the buttons next to the lifts and closed his eyes. A quick swirl of his wand around his head and Harry’s, and they blurred and blended and slipped sideways and—  
  
 _Rose through the stone, swam through the stone, seeking and finding cracks, aiming for light, turning sideways, finding it, coming out in a familiar corridor, learning the concepts of size and space again—_  
  
And stood in the corridor that led towards the Head Auror’s office. Draco brushed some flakes of stone dust off his clothes and began to run again, not letting go of Harry’s hands.  
  
“I didn’t know you could do that,” muttered Harry, from somewhere in the middle of embarrassed silence.  
  
Draco smiled and kept his eyes focused ahead, letting Harry’s hands slip out of his when he felt Harry tug. “It’s a Dark spell,” he murmured. “Not one that I would ordinarily want to use on Ministry grounds, and ones that I haven’t used successfully before.”  
  
“That could have killed us.”  
  
“The Shadowborn, Blue Eyes, Bainbridge, Aurors,” Draco murmured, simply naming the other things in the room at the same time that could have killed them, and then wrenched open the door in front of him. He knew it wasn’t the one that led to Ernhardt’s office, but he had heard noises behind it, and at the moment his instincts were charging and flinching around him, driving him, making him respond to things before he had consciously realized that he should.  
  
Ernhardt was leaning heavily on a desk with his eyes closed. The Aurors who had got him out of trouble stood in a loose circle around him.  
  
Ernhardt lifted his head, eyes turning that shining, unnatural, pupil-less blue color of supernovas. Draco aimed his wand, thinking with one part of himself how stupid they had been to assume Blue Eyes had to have blue eyes when he wasn’t using his flaw. That color was magical, so why shouldn’t it appear and disappear at will, leaving his eyes looking some other way?  
  
“I have a hostage,” Ernhardt said, his voice shuddering and harsh. The Aurors who stood between him and Draco looked at him uneasily, but didn’t retreat.  _They still trust the Ministry that said we were rogues more than they distrust his magic,_ Draco thought in radiant disgust. “You will not come near me.”  
  
Abruptly, he flinched and howled. Draco looked over his shoulder and saw Harry standing with his hand pressed to his forehead, his eyes shut and his hand screwing slowly back and forth as though driving a nail into his scar. Ernhardt sagged and clutched at the desk, his fingers sliding across it. Draco wouldn’t be surprised if they were leaving grooves in the smooth wood.   
  
“I can still hurt you,” Harry whispered. “Let the hostage go, and—”  
  
Ernhardt let himself slump, and Draco knew his mind had gone hunting out from his body again. He remained poised, ready to react at the first touch of the slimy foulness against his own mind, but knowing Ernhardt might reach for Granger, too, if he had figured out who she was.  
  
Instead, though, a door behind the desk opened, and a slender woman stepped out, walking up to stand at Ernhardt’s side with her eyes blazing. The woman rested one hand on Ernhardt’s shoulder and drew a knife from her robe pocket with the other, laying it against her jugular.  
  
“Ginny,” Harry said, heartsick.  
  
Ginny Weasley smiled and said with Blue Eyes’s voice, “Did you miss me, darling?”


	20. Here Are the Ashes

Draco felt the trembling tension that strung itself between Harry and Weasley--though Weasley, in her possessed state, would be unaware of it--and knew that Harry would never willingly break that tension. He would do anything rather than harm a friend. Draco had prized that quality when they became lovers, since it meant Harry was extremely unlikely to turn on him.  
  
Now...  
  
Draco fell back a step and touched Harry on the shoulder. Weasley's unnaturally blue eyes moved at once to him, proving the gesture didn't go unnoticed. Draco held her gaze and said nothing, while he worked his left arm under his sleeve to make sure he knew exactly where the Mark was. Sometimes it could feel as normal as any unstained part of his skin, and he would have to connect directly with it when he cast his spell. He knew he would get only one chance.  
  
"Relieved, Malfoy?" Weasley asked softly, her hoarse voice uttering his name with more contempt than Draco had ever heard from her during their school days. "Thinking that with your rival destroyed, your access to Potter will be free and clear?"  
  
Draco said nothing. He didn't see the point in trading words with their enemy, when Blue Eyes--Ernhardt--would go ahead and do whatever he wanted anyway. And if Ernhardt was stupid enough to keep possessing Weasley when he should take care of the more dangerous people in the room instead, that wasn't Draco's problem.  
  
 _Not stupid. It's necessary._  
  
And Draco understood, then, and could have laughed as he remembered. It was the very first thing they were told about hostages in Auror training, the weakness any plan involving them had. The captor had to keep control of the hostage at all times, or they could break free, turn into a distraction, perhaps even attack, and the people who wanted them back would certainly whisk them out of danger the first time a chance presented itself to do so. Blue Eyes didn't dare loosen his hold on Weasley's mind, or Harry would attack. She might even do so, although Draco didn't have that high an opinion of her mental strength when recovering from possession.  
  
In the meantime, he couldn't read Draco's mind, or take control of him and force him to commit suicide, and that had to be ripping into him, to be denied one source of his usual, undisputed strength.  
  
"This didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?" Draco asked softly as he let his wand drift towards his left arm as much as he could without making it obvious what he was doing. "You planned for the Shadowborn to kill us, and then there would be no connection between you and our murders. It was why you declared us rogue and invoked their power. Their whole  _job_ is to kill rogue Aurors. No one would question your decision if it was made in that light."  
  
Weasley shook her head. "How little you understand of what you are," she said. "How little you understand of what you could be."  
  
Her eyes flickered to Harry, but he still hadn't moved. Draco didn't worry about that. Harry was all poise at this moment, longing and waiting tension, ready to strike the second he had a clear path. He couldn't be a danger to Draco, and he was content to wait until Draco could do something to make that clear path. Draco had never been prouder of him than he was at that moment.  
  
"Of what we could be," Draco echoed, and a minor mystery turned crystalline in his head. "Those definitions the Ministry came up with for twisted after the war, the ones that were supposedly based on the Dark Lord and recognizing future twisted for what they were before they achieved his level.  _You_ came up with the definitions, didn't you? That's why they're so inconsistent with the past research as well as the actual experiences of Aurors."  
  
Ernhardt said nothing, but the flare and shine of his eyes was getting deeper and deeper. Draco laughed softly at him.  
  
"What are you waiting for?" he taunted. "You could possess me and force me to burn my hands off for my contempt of you. Time was when you would have done it before now, for less than what I've said in the last few minutes. But you can't do it, can you? You can't possess more than one person at a time."  
  
 _The limit of his flaw,_ Draco knew Harry was thinking, but didn't say any more than Draco did. They were in tune by now; Draco knew the way Harry's heart beat, the way his breaths heaved, and the way his muscles shifted to point him straight at Weasley and Ernhardt. Harry might even have said it for him, if angering Ernhardt and not keeping his attention focused on Draco was the point.  
  
"You're paranoid," Draco said. "Classic sign of the twisted we've hunted. You've constructed this elaborate artifice to keep yourself safe, twisting the definition of the twisted so that people look in the wrong direction and eliminate those who might be rivals--or who might encourage Aurors to look into the bowels of the Ministry if they started thinking that anyone, everyone, could be a twisted. You had to keep people afraid of them but not afraid enough to get paranoid themselves. No wonder you wanted to kill Alto so badly and kept driving all the twisted she created against her. She had a power that was potentially greater than yours." He paused, because he was ready, the spell poised behind his lips and the location of the Mark glowing in his mind, and he needed Ernhardt distracted. "Or perhaps one that could even affect you? Her power was over the mind, to change people's personalities into slavish worship of her. Did she do that to you, too?  _Could_ she have?"  
  
Ernhardt trembled, but didn't lunge. Draco pushed again. "You really did take Morningstar captive, didn't you? Because she could time travel, and you were trying to see how that could be useful to you. She was desperate enough to come to us." Draco smiled. "Too bad for you that she escaped, and we eliminated her. The same way we'll eliminate you."  
  
And then it came, Ernhardt's mind lashing out, reaching so fast that Draco only felt the sliminess sliding past him for a moment before that foulness was within him, spreading like whips of bile down his limbs, readying him, melting him, making him yield.  
  
Or trying to make him yield.  
  
At the same moment as Ernhardt moved, Harry moved, snatching Weasley up in his arms and whispering some fierce protective spell that Draco only knew was protective because he was so attuned to Harry. He had no time to pay more attention to it, not with Ernhardt there, and his own magic roaring through him, giving him time and space to act.  
  
" _Creo pontem!_ "  
  
The same spell Harry had used, down in the Atrium, when they were trapping Ernhardt and he had forged the link between his scar and Ernhardt’s flaw. This time, Draco was the one to make the link, and make it direct, and he followed it up with a Dark curse, the Darkest he knew that wouldn't kill someone, while Ernhardt was still reeling with shock.  
  
" _Conflagro!_ "  
  
The flames took root on the skin of one of the Aurors guarding Ernhardt, and he dropped straight down, mouth open in agony that he couldn't get the breath to turn into a scream. He was writhing, and he was dying, but the spell had been meant to burn a sacrifice alive, and make a gift of their pain to ancient gods or worse forces. The fire would continue to exist, and make  _him_ exist, for a long while. And in the meantime, it sent Dark magic spiraling into the air.  
  
Draco thrust his left arm out, only able to move that far, he knew, because of Ernhardt's shock. He didn't have the mental defenses that Harry did, and he couldn't have conquered otherwise.  
  
But he had already used Ernhardt's rage to tip him off-balance, and the man still hadn't recovered from the surprise of someone learning who he was, either. And then there would be the lingering pain from the spell Harry had used earlier, and sent flowing down their link.  
  
And now there was Draco's pain.  
  
He felt the flaring Dark magic as pain, and he slammed it straight down the link between him and Ernhardt, all the stronger now that Ernhardt was using the possession flaw directly on him, and from so close.   
  
The scream that came from Ernhardt's mouth was worse than a dragon's. Draco stood up against it, his eyes shut, divorcing himself from the agony that flowed down his arm and flared in his skin. Yes, it was there, yes, it was devastating, and yes, he knew it would take him hours later to recover from it.  
  
But this wasn't hours later. This was now. And Draco intended to roast Ernhardt's flaw out of him, so that he would be left an ordinary wizard without that most dangerous of gifts, and they could hunt and arrest him all the more easily. Send pain through him while he was possessing someone else, and he ought to be catapulted back into his own body and left unable to leave it again, his mind crippled from reaching through the mental links.  
  
So Harry had theorized, anyway.  
  
It was rather hard to be the proof of such a theory.  
  
*  
  
"Harry, Harry, Harry..."  
  
That was all Ginny could say again, over and over again, as she stood clutching his shirt and bending her head towards him. Harry understood. He had been possessed by Blue Eyes himself, and at least he had the means to comprehend it, through the definitions of the twisted that he knew about, and the means to resist it because of the strength of his will. Ginny was simply left shaking.  
  
He was content to stand there and hold her, though, only because he knew there was nothing he could do to help Draco now. Draco had started this particular battle over again, and it was a contest of endurance. Trying to add himself to the link, the way that Draco had when Harry battled Ernhardt directly in the Atrium, would throw them both off-balance, and Ernhardt might be the one to emerge triumphant in that kind of contest.  
  
The other Aurors in the room were trying to beat out the flames that were consuming their fellow, or supporting the Head Auror, or staring helplessly back and forth. That was the other thing Harry could do: keep an eye on them, and make sure  _they_ didn't interfere, either. Luckily, it seemed that more than half of them had no idea what was going on, and the remnant didn't believe what Draco had said to Ernhardt. Hard to fight an enemy you didn't believe in.  
  
Because he was watching Draco, Harry didn't note the door opening at first. But Ginny did, and her gasp drew his attention.  
  
In through the door walked a mangled body. Not mangled beyond recognition, because the face was still intact, but definitely too dead to have survived those wounds. Bainbridge floated, his arms outstretched, his mouth open to show the tangled remains of a tongue and windpipe at the back of his throat.  
  
And behind him came Macgeorge, her eyes dark and shining and calm.  
  
 _She's gone,_ Harry knew, the moment he met those eyes.  _She killed him, but she went full twisted in doing it._  
  
And he knew nothing that could combat a necromancer.  
  
Macgeorge smiled at them, nodding around the room as though she recognized everyone in it and wanted to greet them personally. Then she twirled her wand between her fingers and said to Harry, “You were the one who recognized what I was, first. Thank you for doing that. Without you, I would not have learned my true purpose in life.”  
  
“What is that?” Harry asked. Sometimes it was possible to speak to a twisted as if they were sane, and at least distract them from what they might do otherwise. Postpone it, if not turn back time.   
  
Macgeorge smiled. “Teaching others that necromancy has a place in the Dark Arts of the nation,” she said. “If we can use some of the spells that you have used in your pursuit of justice and the truth, then we ought to be able to use this one.”  
  
The way she said it made Harry’s skin hurt. “Well, maybe,” he said. “But you know that most people don’t have the gift for it. So how could they use it in Auror investigations?”  
  
Ginny was stiff in his arms, and hissing something that Harry couldn’t make out, probably about how he shouldn’t talk this way and encourage Macgeorge in her delusions. Harry rubbed her back. He had no idea what she had suffered in her ordeal with Ernhardt, but he knew that she couldn’t understand the full nature of twisted, or what Macgeorge had become.  
  
“There will be me, to do it for them,” Macgeorge said, and then nodded at the slumping Bainbridge. “Do you like him? I ended your case, when you could not. I killed him for you.”  
  
Her eyes were beginning to shine, to fill with lightning and strength, and Harry found it hard to look away. He swallowed and got out, with an effort, “Right. We owe you thanks. But I don’t think you need to keep him here, do you? Let him go, and give the body to his family, if they still want him.”  
  
“He has none,” Macgeorge said. “His gift isolated him, and pinned him in a world that most other people could not understand.” She paused, and the way she spun her wand between her fingers became a little less confident. “The way that my gift has me,” she added softly. “What else can I do but fight for my place at the heart of things, when there is no one who loves me?”  
  
“Isla does,” Harry said, sure it was true. Perhaps not the way Draco loved him, no, but the way one Auror partner could love another. “Go to her, and ask her. She would take you back, I know. She would give you her attention and her time.”  
  
Macgeorge shook her head. “Once I might have listened to you, but I understand your motives now. You want to change everything you see.” While Harry was still wondering what that meant, she unfolded her arm and pointed a long finger at him. “And I have reason to fear that you would hunt me along with the other twisted. You wouldn’t leave me to hunt them on my own. You wouldn’t leave them to my service.”  
  
“Your service?” Harry asked, but he already knew what she meant, and when the body of Bainbridge turned towards him and lifted his hand, he knew he would be fighting that deadly, twisting magic for the second time in a week. And Macgeorge knew the trick he and Draco had used to try and burn the flaw out of Ernhardt.  
  
“Ginny, get behind me,” he said, so gently and softly that his voice sounded strange to his own ears. She did it, without much more than a little shuffle and a sob. Harry raised his wand and prepared, as best he could, to meet the flaw of a twisted who could command other twisted.  
  
 _We did it once before. We were fighting those twisted that Ernhardt was sending after Alto._  
  
But those twisted had been ones with more minor gifts, less experienced in the use of their flaw than Macgeorge, and under a possession that kept them from using their natural instincts. Harry was sure that Macgeorge’s magic would work  _with_ Bainbridge’s, rather than against it.  
  
There was nothing he could do but go ahead, though, and slip aside from the first attempt Bainbridge made to tug him out of his skin.  
  
*  
  
Draco shook sweat-dampened hair out of his eyes. His left arm had gone numb. He wanted to pant, and didn’t only because he thought that might be a visible signal of weakness for Ernhardt.  
  
He would do the best he could. He would keep Ernhardt at bay until the last possible minute, and burn out his flaw if he could.  
  
But the pain passing through him was beginning to take its toll. It might drive Ernhardt mad—well, more mad than he was—or destroy him, but Draco thought it would do the same thing to him. He didn’t have insanity to cushion him, either. The only thing there was was the pain, a whole world of it, and he was panting and his stomach was flopping in strange ways that had nothing to do with sickness.  
  
He saw something from the corner of his eye, and half-turned his head, to see Macgeorge turning to face him. Bainbridge, dead and leaking power, stood in front of Harry.  
  
Draco felt determination surge through him. More than anything else, he wanted to protect Harry. He would snap the link holding him to Ernhardt if he had to. He moved—  
  
And the link faded, and Draco felt something soft and spidery pass in front of his face, delicate as silk, there and then gone, so that he sneezed and wondered what the fuck was happening.  
  
Then he knew. The link had faded. He no longer held Ernhardt.  
  
And neither did Ernhardt’s body, that Draco and Harry had worked so hard to trap him in. It slumped over his desk under the panicked eyes of his Aurors. Instead, Macgeorge turned her head, and her eyes shone killing blue.  
  
“A strong gift,” Ernhardt said. “I do thank you for this. It may not have occurred to me to possess her otherwise.” He nodded Macgeorge’s head to his own body on the desk. “That one was nearly worn out, but this one will do.”  
  
Harry lunged with a spell that Draco could feel the raw power in, although he didn’t know what it had been meant to do; Harry might not even know, from the way he paused and growled halfway through. Macgeorge, or Ernhardt in her body, moved aside, and the spell crackled into the wall and turned the stones black.  
  
“I shall have to remember that one for future use,” Ernhardt whispered, and then Macgeorge’s body turned and surged away, Apparating before Draco could even think to prevent him. Then again, it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone could break through the anti-Apparition wards around the offices, either.  
  
And they were left with the dead body of Bainbridge, now slumping on the floor and staring up with torn eyes, and the dead body of Ernhardt, limp on the desk with his mouth slightly open and color in his face that mimicked someone who had died of a heart attack. And a crew of staring Aurors who were pressing closer as though they wanted answers.  
  
 _Fuck_ , Draco thought, caught in the midst of pain that was going to fell him. He reached out and put a hand on the desk for lack of anything better to do, wishing that he could wake up and have this be a dream.  
  
*  
  
“Did you kill the Head Auror?”  
  
That was an Auror Harry had worked with when he was still in Lucretius Corps, Andrew Pestle, a good man but a hard one, and one prone to jumping to conclusions. He only said what others had been thinking, too, from the way they formed up behind him. They might have a riot on their hands in a moment, especially because of the flames that Draco had used on another Auror and which had only snuffed out when Draco lost the link to Ernhardt.  
  
Harry grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. He was  _tired,_ and wanted to collapse. They had failed in all ways, except saving Ginny’s life and killing Bainbridge. And while those might not be small things, they still felt like it in the wake of their overwhelming loss. Blue Eyes still lived, and he possessed a body that could use necromancy, and Harry doubted they would ever see Macgeorge as her own independent person again.  
  
But that didn’t give Harry leave to collapse, especially since neither Draco nor Ginny looked as if they could handle any more right now.  
  
“You heard what he said,” Harry murmured instead, locking eyes with Pestle. He conjured a chair for Ginny and moved forwards to support Draco with a gentle hold. Draco leaned against him, and Harry ignored the stares from those Aurors who might be slow on the gossip-listening skills and hadn’t realized that he and Draco were dating.  
  
“That he was—Dark?” Pestle said, and practically whispered the words, which was a foolish thing for an Auror to do, when he ought to know that all sorts of wizards could go Dark.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, and turned away from the ill look Pestle was giving him to support Draco into another conjured chair. “He was behind part of the case that we’ve been pursuing, and he was the one who ordered the Shadowborn into action, to get rid of us when we began to inconvenience him.”  
  
There was more silence after that, and then even more questions. Harry answered them as patiently as he could. He was the only one in the room at the moment who knew everything that had gone on, and the only one able to answer questions.  
  
Things got a little easier when Hermione appeared, out of breath from her run through the Atrium. Harry turned some of the questions over to her, and went on answering the ones that only he could. In the meantime, Ginny began to speak, and Hermione listened to her and offered the comfort Harry didn’t think he could.  
  
At least he was able to send Pestle for Mind-Healer Estillo, so Draco would have someone competent to tend him. Pestle, by that point, seemed to be a converted believer in what had happened to Head Auror Ernhardt, and started trying to convince the others.  
  
Through it all, there was one person Harry was waiting for, one person he dreaded to see appear. And he saw her in the doorway when his throat had begun to feel dry from talking and Mind-Healer Estillo had just declared that she didn’t see anything wrong with Draco that a little bit of rest wouldn’t cure.  
  
Isla Rudie.  
  
She looked at Harry, and no one else—not Bainbridge dead on the floor, not Ernhardt dead on the desk, not Draco leaning forwards with his head on his left arm and whispering to Estillo what being possessed had felt like. After a moment, she gave a nod as though responding to silent music and asked, “Is it true?”  
  
“It is,” Harry said, the truth forming a giant, sticky lump in his throat.  
  
Rudie simply looked at him with those remote eyes, and then turned and walked away. Harry found himself listening for the slam of a door, and didn’t feel better for not hearing it.  
  
Then he had to go back to talking, to persuading the others that the Shadowborn should be called off and he and Draco shouldn’t be arrested for murder.  
  
He supposed, in a way, that it was the end of a case, and they had done what they wanted by bringing Bainbridge within reach of someone who could kill him. But it would be a long time before Harry felt as if anything important had concluded.  
  
In a fever, in a torment, he reached down and squeezed Draco’s hand.  
  
After seconds during which Harry heard only his own heart, Draco squeezed back.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
